I am lucky enough to be one of the first users of Apple’s mixed reality headset, Vision Pro. It’s been almost a week (plus a long-distance flight) since I got it and the more time I spent wearing it, the more of this urge I feel to express how different this thing is, from all other AR/VR headsets out there, from cardboard VRs to Google Glass and HoloLens, onto Valve Index, Quest and PSVR, most of which I have either owned or tried on. It’s not the pixel density or refresh rate or color gamut, not the “Apple ecosystem” and hundreds of native Vision-Pro-curated (and a million more compatible, air quotes) apps, definitely not the external screen with lenticular films and a pair of creepy eyes. It’s something else that sets Vision Pro apart from all its predecessors by a huge margin into its own realm. Apple has done right about this kind of revolutionary products several times already, and I think they’re once again on point with today’s technology. What they’ve been doing all along is to attach a ton of small innovations onto a strictly dictated philosophy and once you do that, with “a good taste” you brew good coffee, almost making it too easy for those spending thousands on espresso machines and beans etc. It’s a small quantitative improvement but through that particular threshold you make a qualitative difference and then it feels huge. After quite a few years of boring, conservative updates, we’re finally seeing something new. It is, however, much harder to describe this difference about Vision Pro specifically, until I saw this video of Casey Neistat on his take of these headsets.

I’ll finish this post with his summary in the end:

The concept of this video was to run around New York City wearing these cuz I thought would be funny – I think it was funny, but something happened… something happened today that was completely unexpected and that something, I don’t think anyone else has really touched on, none of the reviews I’ve seen or read, none of them really put to words what I experienced. So when you take these off they kinda go to sleep like your phone, when you put them back on, you have to unlock them, they scan your eyeballs and then start screen recording. It takes a second. So rather than doing that, I just left these on the entire day: the 2.5 hour battery pack (which) you can plug into a fatter battery. So I never ran out of battery power. And after a couple of hours of running around the streets of New York as not in a controlled environment, my brain sort of clicked and it just forgot it was looking though cameras and screens and it just it took what it saw as reality and that is where this… that’s where the profound moment came from and what occurred to me as I was sitting there in Times Square on a bench, strangers all around me, the real world moving all around me, but I had like a big screen up where I was watching a Mr. Beast video and then over here I had this keyboard that I could interact with over here I had my iMessages and over here I had my Apple TV and then all my apps, and they’re floating in Times Square in the middle of New York City. They’re floating there, I’m actually there and there’s actual humans around me. That moment, I was like, “holy shit, this is it”. This is the future of computing that everyone’s been promising for like the last 15 years. This is something that lets me truly peak into where all of this is going. This isn’t the future of AR or VR. I think this is the future interface for all computing. I think when they figure out how to make these not be heavy $4000 metal ski goggles, but maybe they look like these glasses or something even smaller, that is what it’ll be – in the morning, you won’t remember your phone, you put it on, and that’s it, and it’s like hold on I’ve got a call, “hey what’s up mom I’ll call you back, you look great by the way” (swipes) and that’s what it’s going to look like – and these (Vision Pro headsets) show you that, these reveal that. I as a geek, that was the thing I’ve been looking for forever and they did it right here on a product that’s so new. This has been out for 12 hours and I felt it. So I don’t know that I recommend you should buy one of these at $4000 because I can promise you this: this will be the worst Vision Pro Apple ever ships. It is going to get so much better.