Screen oddities and the M5 Vision Pro
Apple Newsroom: Apple Vision Pro upgraded with the powerful M5 chip and comfortable Dual Knit Band
With M5, Apple Vision Pro renders 10 percent more pixels on the custom micro-OLED displays compared to the previous generation, resulting in a sharper image with crisper text and more detailed visuals. Vision Pro can also increase the refresh rate up to 120Hz for reduced motion blur when users look at their physical surroundings, and an even smoother experience when using Mac Virtual Display.
The new Vision Pro seems to have identical tech besides the M5 processor uptick, so this is an interesting insight into the display on the original model. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something here, but it seems like the original model was unable to take full advantage of the displays, otherwise how would we be getting better display "specs" with the same hardware?
The original Vision Pro display supported 90Hz, 96Hz, and 100Hz refresh rates and "23 million pixels", while the new model adds 120Hz as an option and the same 23 million pixels. How does the same screen display "10 percent more pixels"? I assume this means that the original was running the video output at sub-native resolution, and now the M5 model gets closer to running at the display's native resolution and max refresh rate. For all the talk of how bad non-integer scaled resolutions look like displays, are we saying the Vision Pro has been doing this the whole time? Scandalous!
The Vision Pro displays in both models are 3,660x3,200 each, and I now suspect that the video output from the M2 model was something like 3,400x3,000 and was stretched to fill the physical pixels on the screen (think outputting a 4k video signal to a 5k display). That wasn't ideal, but it was a reality of how much GPU oomph the M2 had available. Jumping ahead 3 generations of Apple silicon now lets them render native resolution video to the displays.
This is just a guess, but I don't see any other way to interpret this news.
A few other notable things from the new version stood out to me. First, as noted by MacRumors, there is no trade-in for the original Vision Pro when buying the M5 model. That's a bummer for early adopters who might have expected to be able to upgrade for a reduced cost, but nope, it's $3,499+ for everyone. Not even Apple wants that original Vision Pro.
And second, the original model came with 2 headbands and the new one just comes with a single band that is a near perfect combination of the first two. I think this looks nice, and as someone who finds the headset generally uncomfortable with both existing bands, I'm tempted to buy one of these new ones ($99) but I'm holding off for now.
