Apple Vision Pro Review | PCMag

I’ve been listening to rumors about Apple launching a virtual reality headset (VR) for half of my 20-year career writing about technology, but even I was surprised when it announced the Vision Pro. It’s the company’s first foray into the head-mounted display space, and a wildly ambitious one. Despite Apple’s attempts to spin it as a “spatial computer” and avoid describing it as any sort of “reality” headset, it’s ultimately both a VR and augmented reality (AR) device. It’s also the most advanced device of either category to ever hit the market. 

Starting at $3,499, the Vision Pro costs several times more than its closest competitor, the $1,499.99 Meta Quest Pro. For the money, you get the sharpest head-mounted display there is, with the best camera and sensor technology, and processing power that rivals an iPad Pro or a MacBook Air. It also offers the best control system I’ve ever experienced with AR or VR, one that masterfully embraces eye and hand tracking for a natural, intuitive interface that doesn’t require any physical controllers.

The Vision Pro is more polished, more stable, and more flexible than I could have expected from Apple’s first entry in this category, and it truly impresses. It isn’t perfect, though, due to a few design frustrations and software availability limitations. None of those issues are as showstopping as its price, however. While indeed revolutionary, the Vision Pro is so wildly expensive that only the most dedicated and well-heeled of early adopters will actually consider buying it.

1Cool Thing: Apple Vision Pro: Everything You Should Know

Want to Order? Scan Your Head

The base Vision Pro has 256GB of storage, but 512GB and 1TB versions are also available for $3,699 or $3,899, respectively. For this review, we purchased the base model.

Apple only offers the Vision Pro directly from its website or its retail stores. That’s because there’s an entire fitting process required to make sure the headset sits snugly against your face. If you order online, you need an iPhone or an iPad with Face ID. The Apple site will show a QR code to scan with your device, after which it will scan your face and head. If you buy the headset in a store, someone there will do the fitting for you.

Design: Apple’s Aesthetic With a Finicky Fit

The Vision Pro looks and feels like an Apple product through and through. In fact, with its aluminum body, glossy black full-face glass front, and Digital Crown, it almost resembles a giant, curved Apple Watch. The visor itself feels very solid thanks to its metal-and-glass design, which also gives it a premium appearance that headsets from Meta, PlayStation, and Valve lack.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

This design also makes the Vision Pro front-heavy. At approximately 22 ounces depending on headband configuration, it weighs slightly less than the Quest Pro (25.5 ounces), but more than the Quest 3 (18.2 ounces). Its weight wouldn’t be a problem if it was distributed well, but there’s no vertical strap running from the visor to the back of the head like there is on the Quest 3, or rigid support like on the PS VR2 or Quest Pro.

Two headbands are included with the Vision Pro, but neither offer quite as much balance or support as I would like. The Solo Knit Band is a wide headband with breathable, elastic fabric that fits around the back of the head. A knob on the side adjusts the headband by loosening or tightening two cords that run around the edges of the fabric.

Apple Vision Pro with Solo Knit Band (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

As an alternative, the Dual Loop Band has a much more conventional headband design, with two adjustable straps that run horizontally over the back and the top of the head that can be adjusted with Velcro. You can easily swap between the two headbands by pulling the orange tabs next to the magnetic interlocks that securely connect each side to the visor. Unfortunately, the Solo Knit Band doesn’t have a rigid support for the back of the head and the overhead headband on the Dual Loop Band runs horizontally over the top of the head (parallel to the visor) instead of vertically, so neither provides ideal stability. The Vision Pro stays put on my face, but I found myself regularly tweaking the headbands and wiggling the visor to adjust the fit and positioning.

Apple Vision Pro with Dual Loop Band (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Despite its slight weight and balance issues, the Vision Pro’s premium materials help prevent any significant discomfort. Two light seal cushions, or padded memory foam bands that sit between the headset and your face, are included, and they feel quite cool and pleasant. They attach to the headset with magnets, though not as securely as the tab-locking headbands, and sit on top of a rigid, fabric-covered light seal that keeps the lenses a short, visually comfortable distance away from your eyes.

On the visor itself, the Apple Watch-like Digital Crown sits on the upper right corner, and a button resides on the upper left. Between them are two large vents for cooling. The bottom edge has no controls, but features two large speaker grilles, several tiny microphones, and two cameras that face downward.

EyeSight on the Vision Pro (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The glass face of the Vision Pro features four barely visible cameras and an outward-facing display that glows and shows a projection of your eyes when you’re looking out at the real world through the integrated cameras, a feature Apple calls EyeSight. It gives the impression that the Vision Pro is a transparent AR device and that people around you can look directly at you, even when you’re wearing it. That isn’t too off the mark, given the headset’s impressive passthrough view, which streams real-time video from the external cameras to the internal display so you can see your physical surroundings. The EyeSight view from the outside isn’t very clear or bright, but it at least gives others some sense that you’re looking at them through the mask.

Battery Life: Two Hours

Instead of a built-in battery, the Vision Pro uses a separate battery pack (included) that attaches to the headset through a circular connection on the left side. It isn’t magnetic, just a rock-solid metal connector that twists 90 degrees to keep it secure. The battery itself is permanently attached to a fabric-wrapped, four-foot-long cable, and is a hefty little hunk of aluminum. It’s a bit smaller than an iPhone, but heavier than one. Typical of Apple’s design aesthetics, the battery pack is sleek, smooth, and simple, featuring just the cable, a USB-C charging port next to where the cable is attached, and a status LED between them.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Because the battery pack is basically a phone-sized aluminum soap bar that lacks any controls, it isn’t meant to be held while you use the Vision Pro. You can slip it in a pocket or place it next to you, but there’s no clip or holder for it. If you want to put the battery pack on your belt, you can get a $49.95 Belkin battery holder.

Battery life remains the biggest weak point for standalone AR/VR headsets across the board, and the Vision Pro is no different. Apple estimates that you can get up to two hours of general use (consisting of video playback, internet browsing, video capture, and FaceTime) or 2.5 hours of straight video playback on the Vision Pro. You can use the headset while you charge the battery, and additional batteries are available for $199 each, but you can’t hot-swap batteries; switching between them requires shutting down and restarting the Vision Pro.

In testing, I could sit back and browse the web or play games on the Vision Pro for more than an hour before the battery dipped much below the halfway mark. You can’t watch a full movie on a single charge, but at least the battery can remain plugged into a power outlet while you use the Vision Pro. Keeping it plugged in and staying seated for long sessions doesn’t bother me any more than trying to find a place for the battery pack when I’m moving around.

No case is included with the Vision Pro, which is disappointing for the price. If you want to carry it around safely, Apple offers a travel case for a stiff $199.

Hardware: Mac-Worthy Silicon

The Vision Pro’s steep price can at least partially be explained by its hardware.

Two chips drive the Vision Pro, an Apple M2 and an R1. The M2 is the familiar system on a chip found in the iPad Pro, the 2022 MacBook Pro, the 2023 MacBook Air, and the 2023 Mac mini. It features an 8-core CPU, a 10-core GPU, and a 16-core Neural Engine, and is paired with 16GB of RAM. It’s a desktop-worthy chip, even if its specs are eclipsed by beefier M2 Pro, Max, and Ultra variants, and the M3 series Apple launched in late 2023.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The M2 has the Vision Pro’s GPU, but all of the camera processing is performed by the separate R1 chip. It manages the input from the headset’s dozen cameras, five sensors, and six microphones, and Apple claims it can stream video of the outside world to the display with a lag of only 12 milliseconds. Since augmented reality is such an important aspect of the Vision Pro as a spatial computer, this dedicated chip is vital and lets the M2 devote its resources to more conventional processing tasks.

For connectivity, the Vision Pro has Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3. It surprisingly doesn’t support Wi-Fi 6E.

Display and Cameras: Nearly as Good as the Naked Eye

For the display, the Vision Pro features a micro-OLED projection system with 90, 96, and 100Hz refresh rates. Apple doesn’t give the exact resolution, but states that it shows 23 million pixels, which is about three times as many as 4K video (8.3 million pixels). It’s bright, colorful, and sharp, far exceeding the clarity of the second-highest-resolution headset we’ve tested, the 6-million-pixel-per-eye HTC Vive Pro 2.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Just like Apple doesn’t describe the Vision Pro’s exact resolution, it also doesn’t specify its field of view. It’s certainly very wide, comparable with any other VR headset and much wider than the 30- to 60-degree fields of view of AR smart glasses. There’s a bit of a sensation of looking through goggles with limited peripheral vision, but almost anywhere you look and focus on, besides the very edges of your periphery, will come through clearly. Immersive virtual landscapes, floating app windows, and video playback on the Vision Pro all look very clear and bright.

I’m nearsighted, but the Vision Pro’s display is sharp enough that I could use the headset without corrective lenses for about 20 minutes at a time before the effects of eye fatigue started to set in. Fortunately, you can get prescription lens inserts from Zeiss for an extra $99 when you order the Vision Pro. They’re delivered separately, even if you pick up the Vision Pro in a store. They fit over the headset’s lenses with magnets and worked well in testing, improving clarity while allowing me to comfortably use the Vision Pro for longer periods than without.

The Vision Pro’s 12 cameras and incredibly sharp display offer the best passthrough view I’ve ever seen in a VR headset. Passthrough shows a live view of everything around you with almost the exact same perspective and field of view, offering a nearly natural view of your surroundings, as if you were looking through your own eyes. It appears almost instantly when you put on the headset, which makes the experience feel like you’re slipping on a pair of transparent goggles and not a device that completely replaces your vision with a camera feed on a pair of screens. It’s a little fuzzier and dimmer than natural vision, a limit of the cameras more than the display.

(Credit: Apple/Will Greenwald)

Color cameras in the Meta Quest 3 and Quest Pro also allow for passthrough in a pinch, but the Vision Pro’s view is on a completely different level. I can walk around my apartment without fear of tripping on something, and confidently interact with physical objects in the real world, all while while wearing the Vision Pro. I can even read tiny text on my computer monitor or my phone through it, whereas on other headsets it looks like a smudge.

Controls: Just Use Your Eyes and Hands

The Vision Pro’s control scheme is by far the best I’ve ever used in a head-mounted display. It eschews any form of physical controllers, which are usually a requirement for VR headsets, and instead relies purely on your eyes and your hands. Simply put, the Vision Pro’s control scheme should be the template for all mixed reality devices from now on.

Chess in Game Room on Apple Arcade (Credit: Apple/Will Greenwald)

Eye and hand tracking are the keys to navigating visionOS, the Vision Pro’s operating system. During setup, the Vision Pro will take you through a quick calibration that involves holding your hands in front of the headset so the outward-facing cameras can scan them, then looking at dots on the display so the inward-facing cameras can analyze how your eyes focus on different points in your field of vision. After that, all you have to do is look at a user interface element to select it. Whether it’s a button, an icon, a scroll bar, or a text field, it will glow slightly to indicate that the Vision Pro knows you want to interact with it. Then, all you have to do is tap your index finger and thumb together.

It’s an incredibly simple control system that works extremely well. Just look and tap your fingers together, and you can do anything you would do with a mouse click or a tap on a touch screen. When a simple tap isn’t enough, pinching your fingers together functions the same as a swipe or a click-and-drag gesture. Pinching and moving your hand is all you need to do to flip left and right between pages of apps on the home screen, or to scroll up and down on a website.

(Credit: Apple/Will Greenwald)

With the Vision Pro calibrated for your eyes and hands, these gestures are accurate and reliable. The eye-based object selection worked almost perfectly with any element that was remotely in front of me. It became less accurate when I tried to focus on objects around the edges of my vision, but that’s a minor issue.

Hand tracking works better than I expected as well. The Vision Pro’s cameras are wide enough that they can follow your hands as long as they’re in front of the headset, and can identify taps and pinches in nearly any position. I could control the headset with my hands in my lap, even while petting my cat, and I didn’t experience any problems with the gestures. Just as impressively, I didn’t experience any accidental gesture activation and never felt like the interface had to be carefully danced around to avoid finicky behavior.

I’ll note that the Meta Quest Pro also has eye tracking, and both it and the Quest 3 have hand tracking. However, the Vision Pro is leagues ahead of those models on both fronts. On Meta’s headsets, eye tracking and hand tracking aren’t consistently supported across apps, and using hand gestures requires more precision and feels more awkward than on the Vision Pro. For both Meta headsets, you need their physical controllers to perform most functions.

VisionOS: A Familiar Pedigree

An excellent control scheme isn’t useful if the operating system and the user interface can’t keep up, and for the most part, visionOS delivers. The Vision Pro’s operating system is built on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, with a familiar and accessible design language that anyone who’s touched an Apple smartphone, tablet, or computer in the last decade should be able to pick up quickly.

(Credit: Apple/Will Greenwald)

Pressing the Digital Crown on the Vision Pro brings up the visionOS home window, an array of app icons like you would see on an iPad. All visionOS apps appear in this view, with additional swipeable pages populating as you install more. You can group apps together in folders just like on Apple’s other operating systems, and your compatible iOS and iPadOS apps automatically appear in their own folder to differentiate them from native apps.

Opening an app will bring up its own window with a circle and a thin white bar underneath it. The circle blooms into a familiar X-to-close button. The bar serves as a virtual handle to move the window around. Just look at it and pinch your fingers to move it anywhere around you. If you want a bigger or smaller view for that app, you can resize the window by looking at the lower left or right corners until a curved bar appears, then doing the same pinch-and-drag gesture.

Rolling your eyes up slightly will make a floating button appear. Tapping that button opens an iOS pulldown-like quick menu where you can check notifications, toggle different modes (airplane, focus/do not disturb, travel), mirror your view to a nearby AirPlay device, link with a nearby Mac to control it on the Vision Pro, and access a few other handy functions. 

VisionOS can easily run multiple apps at once, and since you can arrange them anywhere around you, they’re much easier to keep track of than on an iPad or iPhone. Even games and other virtual experiences that expand to take up your entire view when active fade easily and become circle-and-bar windows when you press the Digital Crown to bring up the home screen, letting you flip between them like any other app.

The blur around the sides is foveation, a rendering technique that sharpens the display where the eye is focusing (Credit: Apple/Will Greenwald)

Multitasking isn’t perfect, though. While you can make multiple apps float around you, there isn’t an easy way to bring up a list of everything open and jump directly to it like you can with the macOS dock. There also isn’t a visible task manager, so I couldn’t easily clean up my “desktop” when I physically moved between my desk and my couch. As a result, some app windows ended up floating awkwardly and nearly invisibly across my apartment.

I also encountered a bug where, after using the Vision Pro for a while, I couldn’t even bring up the Settings menu; I tapped but it wouldn’t open. This was before I installed the latest update for the headset, though, so it might have already been fixed.

Apps: More Than You’d Think, Fewer Than You’d Hope

App selection on visionOS is a mixed bag, but better than I’ve seen on any other just-launched AR/VR platform. Several Apple mainstays come preinstalled on the Vision Pro, including Apple TV, Freeform, Keynote, Mail, Messages, Music, Notes, and Safari.

Besides Apple TV, native apps for Crunchyroll, Disney+, Max, and Pluto TV are available. Microsoft also put its productivity tools like Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, and Word on the Vision Pro, and WebEx and Zoom can be accessed. Apple Arcade works on visionOS, with a dozen native games at launch including the board game collection Game Room, the block-connecting adventure Lego Builder’s Journey, the Beat Saber-like rhythm game Synth Riders, and Super Fruit Ninja.

(Credit: Apple/Will Greenwald)

VisionOS’ iOS foundation also opens it up to hundreds of iOS apps that run perfectly on the Vision Pro as floating windows. Any iPad or iPhone apps will appear in the Compatible Apps folder, where they’ll stay because you can’t pull them out of that folder onto the main app list. It’s just an extra tap, but a bit annoying if you want to fully customize your Vision Pro’s home screen with your favorite apps. Apple’s apps that don’t yet have visionOS versions include Books, Home, Maps, News, Pages, Podcasts, and Voice Memos.

Prime Video is available, along with Mastodon, Pinterest, Reddit, and X. Most major delivery service apps are also downloadable, but not Uber Eats. To my pleasant surprise, the fiction writing toolbox Scrivener, a flawlessly performing Steam Link, and our three main mobile benchmark apps (3DMark, Antutu, and Geekbench) were also in the App Store.

The store has some very notable omissions, though. No Google apps are available, including Chrome, which is wild since Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Opera’s iPad apps all run on the Vision Pro. Netflix, Twitch, and YouTube are also absent. Those are pretty big names to not even support the iPad versions on the Vision Pro, especially when I could run 3DMark benchmarks and stream games from my Steam PC on it perfectly. The aforementioned missing apps can all be accessed through Safari and work quite well in the browser, but these omissions are disappointing nonetheless.

(Credit: Apple/Will Greenwald)

Unless it completely takes over your view, whatever app you use will show up against your preferred backdrop. The backdrop can be as simple as the passthrough video feed that lets you navigate your surroundings, or it can be one of several surprisingly good-looking simulated landscapes. There’s a lake near Mount Hood, a rocky beach in Hawaii, and even the moon, each with both day and night views. The landscapes are especially impressive because they’re fully 3D and photorealistic. It can genuinely look like you’re sitting by a lake, surrounded by trees with a mountain in the background, with the leaves blowing and the water gently stirring.

Switching between the passthrough video and the virtual backgrounds is as simple as rotating the Digital Crown, which will make the landscape spread out around you as you twist it. You can have the view completely surround you, or just in front of you while you can still see the real world to your sides. There are also several colorful light filters you can apply that virtually tweak the lighting of your physical surroundings through the headset.

VisionOS lets you share what you see to any device that supports Apple AirPlay 2, like an Apple TV 4K or a Roku media streamer. You can also mirror your Mac’s screen to the Vision Pro, giving you full access to whatever your iMac, Macbook, or Mac Mini can do. Gesture controls don’t work on this streamed virtual display, so you’ll have to use your Mac’s keyboard and mouse or trackpad. You can’t currently stream iPhone or iPad screens to the Vision Pro, just Macs running macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Streaming my view through the Vision Pro to a Roku Ultra worked perfectly, as did streaming a Macbook Air desktop to the Vision Pro. 

Performance: A Virtual iPad Pro

As mentioned, our mobile benchmark apps installed and ran on the Vision Pro, so we were able to test its performance against the M2-powered iPad Pro. In fact, the Vision Pro was detected as an iPad Pro in the apps. With similar specs, the Vision Pro comes close to the iPad Pro in performance, which is much more impressive than it sounds.

(Credit: Apple/UL Solutions/Will Greenwald)

In Geekbench 6, the Vision Pro scored 2,444 for single-core and 7,854 for multi-core CPU benchmarks. That’s very close to the iPad Pro, especially for single-core (2,545/9,505). The headset also scored 2,021,940 on Antutu, almost hitting the iPad Pro’s 2,197,677. While we don’t test iPads with 3DMark, we do test laptops with it. The Vision Pro scored 6,058 on the Wild Life Extreme benchmark, respectably near the 2023 MacBook Air’s 6,856. The only hiccup in testing was the Geekbench GPU test, which made the app crash. Even with that, it was a smoother benchmarking process than I would have expected to see on a new platform. 

If these numbers don’t sound amazing because they fall short of the iPad Pro and MacBook Air, that’s because you’ve missed a detail of the testing process. These are all iPad apps compatible with Vision Pro, and they run in floating windows. Every benchmark ran and got these results while floating next to my desk as a fixed object that I could move by pinching and dragging, and physically walk around. Getting those numbers while managing the headset’s spatial rendering and video passthrough is incredible, and proof of the combined power of the M2 (for standard CPU and GPU functions) and the R1 (for camera processing).

Disney+ (Credit: Apple/Disney/Will Greenwald)

The Experience: It Starts Strong, and Grows on You

I used the Vision Pro for several days, and every time I put it on I became more comfortable using it. Getting accustomed to the control system took a matter of minutes, and after that I was flinging windows around, playing chess, and watching video on the headset. Despite a few hiccups and some missing software, visionOS proved mostly stable even when I ran benchmarks, and the holes in third-party app support for Twitch, YouTube, and most Google services had simple workarounds through their desktop pages in Safari.

Visually, the experience is fantastic. The Vision Pro’s display is by far the sharpest I’ve ever used, to the point that walking around and using the passthrough view felt genuinely comfortable in my apartment. Windows are bright and easy to read in almost any position and at any size, making it feel like I really had multiple huge monitors floating around me.

Disney+ (Credit: Apple/Disney/Will Greenwald)

Video content is also excellent, with Disney+’s app experience being the most impressive. Its virtual theater environment is detailed and lifelike, and 3D movies like Doctor Strange and Avatar look incredible. 3D came and went as a gimmick for TVs, and 3D movies haven’t been broadly available for VR headsets, but on the Vision Pro they look as good as they do in the theater. It’s just a shame the battery needs to be plugged in for me to watch an entire movie this way, because the headset can’t last long enough on its own. Moreover, the front-heavy balance makes it uncomfortable to keep the headset on for the length of a feature film.

Synth Riders (Credit: Apple/Kluge Interactive/Will Greenwald)

Sound is just as impressive, thanks to spatial audio similar to what the AirPods Max accomplish. The speakers on the Vision Pro are loud, clear, and are spread out far enough from your ears that they can actually produce a compelling surround sound effect that pans and shifts based on how you move your head. When you’re watching a movie, you really get a sense of theater audio, with most of the sound coming from the screen but with additional effects around you. It’s very compelling, but it means there’s no sound isolation whatsoever, and anyone around you can hear whatever you’re listening to.

Steam Link streaming Gunbrella (Credit: Apple/Doinksoft/Valve/Will Greenwald)

Game Room is fun for playing virtual chess and other games with your eyes and fingers, and Synth Riders is an enjoyable and high-energy Beat Saber-like rhythm game. The real surprise came from the compatible iPad app version of Steam Link. I paired an Xbox gamepad with the Vision Pro over Bluetooth and played games streamed from my Steam PC flawlessly. Floating on a big screen in front of me, the Steam Big Picture interface and any games I loaded looked and felt just like they do when I’m playing them on my monitor at my desk. Through my Wi-Fi 6 network, I could play some pretty precise platformers and not feel any noticeable lag.

FaceTime calls work through the Vision Pro, though there isn’t a dedicated FaceTime app. Instead, you can make calls via the People section of the home screen or the Messages app. Instead of showing a video of your face with the headset on, the Vision Pro scans your face to create a simulated Persona. It’s a digital avatar that shows expressions and talks as you do. It’s incredibly lifelike, but not entirely, and it can’t get hair quite right.

My FaceTime Persona (Credit: Apple; Will Greenwald)

Between the Mac Virtual Display streaming, Apple and Microsoft apps, and Safari’s power for web-based productivity apps, the Vision Pro can potentially be a very capable work device. Pairing it with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse is just as easy as pairing it with a gamepad, as is picking up your Mac’s wireless keyboard and mouse/touchpad. If you want to switch between the Virtual Display and apps on the Vision Pro itself, you need to switch to the control devices connected to your Mac instead of using peripherals paired with the headset, which is a little awkward, but there’s still plenty of room to develop your own workflow.

At least, there’s room if your work doesn’t involve visual or multimedia editing. While the iPad version of Adobe Lightroom is available on visionOS, Photoshop and all major video editing apps are absent. It’s also difficult to get large files directly on or off the Vision Pro, both because of its limited storage and its complete lack of physical data transfer options, so any work you do is going to require sending it over a cloud service.

Amazing, But Out of Reach for Most

The Apple Vision Pro is a stunning device that offers the most intuitive and compelling mixed reality experience I’ve ever seen. It lets you juggle multiple app windows around your home and wander around virtual worlds with equal ease, and its control system is fundamentally superior to any other headset on the market. It’s the strongest first attempt I’ve seen from a new platform in this fairly niche and technically complex category, and it launches with more entertaining and useful activities and experiences than Oculus/Meta, HTC Vive, or PlayStation VR did when they first came out. The Vision Pro doesn’t feel like a glorified developer kit; this is a headset you can actually find things to do with.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

It’s just hard to recommend buying it, because it’s still the first-generation version of a new platform in a new category, and it costs $3,500. That’s more than two MacBook Pros for a device that doesn’t have the utility or processing power of one of them. If the Vision Pro cost $1,000 or even $1,500 (the launch prices of the Valve Index and Meta Quest Pro respectively), it would have cinched our Editors’ Choice award. At over twice that, the Vision Pro moves from expensive to downright exorbitant.

Looking ahead, I can see the Vision Pro as a precursor to a more affordable Apple Vision headset that truly makes mixed reality compelling to the broad public, like the iPhone did for smartphones, the iPad did for tablets, and the Apple Watch did for smartwatches. They all required a few attempts to really click with a wider user base than technophiles and early adopters, and Apple head-mounted displays will probably fare the same.

Until then, if you can toss away nearly four grand on a whim, go for it. You’ll have fun, and get a taste for what I hope is the future of AR and VR interactivity. Otherwise, though, you could get enough Meta Quest 3s for an entire family, or three Meta Quest Pros to experience eye tracking (though in a much less polished state than Apple offers).