If you enjoy your Vision Pro, don't let this post imply that i think you're wrong to enjoy it. This is a personal blog with my personal experiences, not some neutral outlet trying to assign an objective score to each product.

It’s been one year to the day since the Apple Vision Pro launched and oh boy, has it been a ride. After one month of use, I posted my review of the product here on the blog, and a 6-month review was also my season 3 premiere episode of A Better Computer last fall. Here’s how I wrapped up my 1-month review:

For my part, keeping the Vision Pro past its return window is a gamble on the future. As I think I’ve pretty clearly laid out above, I have serous issues with this product and I remain skeptical of its utility in the short run. That said, it might turn into something special and I want to be there to experience it if it does. It’s not fully rational and I would not expect everyone to feel this way, but if there’s a chance to get a foothold in the next big thing, I want to be there in the mix.

And if I could sum up my thoughts after 6 months, it was basically that I didn’t find the headset useful for much of anything besides watching movies, which I did enjoy a good deal.

How I’m feeling about watching movies today

I’m writing this after being on a week-long work trip to Orlando. I spent 4 nights in a hotel room and I watched YouTube, a few episodes of Silo season 2, and an episode of Severance. I had my Vision Pro with me, I had those all downloaded to the Vision Pro so I wouldn’t have to worry about good internet access in the hotel…and I watched everything on my MacBook.

Then I got home and watched The Order on Saturday morning and a season of Netflix’s Castlevania on Sunday (today as of writing). I watched those on my TV with AirPod Pros.

All that is to say I haven’t used my Vision Pro in nearly a month and even in the use case I was most high on, I don’t use it for anymore. I actively find it obnoxious to wear, and I simply don’t find the cost of watching a movie or TV show on a massive screen in the headset to be worth the trade-off of watching in a more relaxed manner, even if that sometimes means watching on a 14” laptop screen.

This isn’t to say I’ll never use it for movie watching again. I think that if a big blockbuster movie comes out and I watch it first on VOD, then I very well may watch it in the Vision Pro to get the bigger-than-life experience. But I don’t think it will be the default way I watch things going forward. I’d rather be more comfortable and be able to better interact with the world around me than to have the bigger screen.

I will acknowledge that I have a pretty good 65” TV in my living room, and that means I have a bigger, nicer picture than most people, although in 2025 TV prices are so low that I’m really not that far out of the mainstream. I can get a slightly worse version of my TV from Walmart for $338, which is truly accessible to most people.

The gaming story

This was bad before and it has gotten a bit better, but it’s still a far cry from what you can do with other headsets on the market (namely the Quest 3). You can pair a PS5 or Xbox controller with the headset to play 2D games, including via streaming platforms like NVIDIA GeForce Now and locally from your PC or PS5 with Moonlight and Portal respectively, but I just don’t find those super compelling, especially when these methods of playing have more lag and lower image quality than playing on a monitor or 4K TV.

I hope the rumors of PSVR2 controllers coming to the Vision Pro help bring some actual VR games to visionOS, but I’m not going to hold my breath too much.

My Meta Quest 3 is worse than the Vision Pro in almost every technical way, but it’s a far better gaming experience across the board, and it’s done this by having real controllers, actual VR and AR games, and by courting developers to make great stuff on their platform. I don’t play my Quest 3 most days (or even most weeks), but I can tell you a dozen amazing gaming experiences I have had on it, and zero that I’ve had on the Vision Pro.

Productivity

I won’t beat a dead horse here, but needless to say I don’t do any work on my Vision Pro. I find working in visionOS to be so low fidelity with its eye tracking that I just don’t enjoy doing literally anything I’ve tried in there. I can pair a trackpad which theoretically should give me more precise input, but I still don’t enjoy that.

And yes, I’ve tried to do a ton of work in the Mac virtual display, and I just do not enjoy that either. As mentioned above, I was on the road last week and was working on developing my app, and I did it 100% from the laptop screen. I know some people really love this virtual display mode, but I simply find it less convenient and far less crisp than using a traditional display.

Novelty

I’ve mentioned a few experiences in the Vision Pro that felt really cool, but that I’ve only done once and never again. The live Talk Show from WWDC was one, which was a cool experience, but I’ve never done again (partially because literally no other events have been available since then).

I also really enjoyed playing some games with a friend using spatial personas, but I haven’t done that since that single experience either.

I enjoy the immersive videos a decent amount, but they still feel like IMAX nature shorts to me. Like yes, I think they’re cool and all, but I’ve gotten past the novelty stage and just watch them now if the subject is interesting to me. The fact they’re shot in 3D and take up my whole field of view is a nice bonus, but not a reason to spend time on a topic I’m not super enthused by.

The bottom line is that there are some experiences that make me go “whoa”, but those experiences are few and far between and are almost always one-and-done experiences for me.

The Vision Pro is a technical juggernaut

All of this said, I do think it’s worth recognizing the Vision Pro is a technical triumph in most ways. In basically every measurable spec, this is the best headset consumers can buy today, and it might even be the best package of headset tech no matter what your budget is.

But we’re Apple fans, and raw specs have never been what we point to as evidence that one product is better than another (well, we kinda do now that Apple silicon is so fast, but that’s for another day). The question is always what those specs allow you to do, and for me that doesn’t add up to much today.

I also think these raw specs and premium materials have made the product worse to use in a few ways. The metal body feels great in the hand and looks fantastic as a piece of art, but it makes the headset heavier when actually using it. We need a lot of power to run the SoC and high res displays, but that’s meant that Apple needed to make an external battery you need to manage whenever you’re using the headset. The Quest 3 is made of plastic, has a slower SoC, and lower-res displays, but it’s far lighter on my head and is completely wireless which makes it more convenient to use. Apple went max specs and materials at the cost of usability while the Quest 3 went lower end but has a more user-friendly hardware experience.

I don’t bring this Quest comparison to say the Quest 3 is a better product for everyone, I just bring it up to illustrate the point that different products are making different trade-offs. I am explicitly saying that the external battery pack for the Vision Pro is a big knock against it and I hope this is the only visionOS hardware to ship with a mandatory external battery pack.

How I’d move the needle

Let’s pretend I was given full access to Apple’s product teams working on the Vision Pro and they would implement any changes I wanted with the current hardware: what would I ask them to do?

The first thing I would suggest is that we need 3D-tracked controllers to work with this thing. Bringing PSVR2 controllers over soon-ish is good, but honestly I think Apple should make their own and they should be bundled in with the headset so everyone has them. I think the eye tracking option is good so that you can always control the system even if you don’t have anything else with you, but actual controllers are so much better for accuracy. They’re also good for accessibility since some people can’t control their eyes as well as their hands (and vice versa, of course, which is why options are good) and it can be a real struggle to focus precisely on something in the UI. I even struggle with this constantly, especially when it comes to video controls — I often struggle to focus on the back button when it’s insistent that I’m actually looking at the environments button beside it, for example. As I’ve said several times over the past year, visionOS has really made me realize how rarely I’m intently staring at a button I’m clicking on macOS or iPadOS, and decoupling what I’m looking at from what I’m interacting with would be great.

Beyond that, I would urge them to partner with video game developers and publishers to get some really great games onto visionOS. This is literally impossible without the controllers mentioned above, but they need to get some really great games onto the platform. I think playing Half-Life Alyx, Batman Arkham Shadow, and Horizon Call of the Mountain would be fantastic on such high resolution displays, we just need those companies to have the hardware and incentives to bring them to Apple’s platform.

This is more of a content play as well, but I would also focus on getting our camera rigs out to more sporting events so that there was more sports content on the headset. Make the Vision Pro the best place to watch football or baseball or Formula 1 or whatever. I know this is easier said than done, but I think there’s something there if Apple can make sports really great on this thing. Of course we run into the issue of everything in the headset being something you do alone, so making the best Super Bowl experience would be useless since that is often a social experience with eating and drinking (something else I’ve found very annoying to do in the headset), but maybe there’s something to be done with spatial personas so you could watch with your friends who live far away.

After that I’m honestly a bit out of ideas. It’s not a lack of features or that the things that are there are implemented badly, it’s more that I’m not sure what I would find super compelling to do in this environment.

Final thoughts

For me, the major hurdle this product category has is that it just sucks to wear a big headset on your face. It’s heavy, it leaves red marks on my face after 20 minutes of use, it isolates me from the people around me, and it messes up my hair. That can all be worth it if the experiences I have when wearing the headset are good enough, though. As stated in the last section, I simply don’t know what those would be right now. The Vision Pro is a technical marvel that I simply don’t find myself wanting to use for just about anything.

We’re about 4 months from WWDC and learning what’s in visionOS 3, and maybe there will be something there that changes everything, but right now I guess the Vision Pro is just something that’s going to sit in a drawer 99% of the time, which seems to be the fate of all VR headsets for most people…