04FEB2024

As promised (threatened?) last week, this week’s Hiro Report is being written entirely from within the Vision Pro. I was fortunate to get one on release day and have gotten to spent probably a cumulative ~5-6 hours using the device over the course of the weekend. My first day was not great! I am at the tail end of a cold and was feeling a bit nauseous and had tender sinuses BEFORE I put on the Vision Pro for the first time. Feeling as crummy as I did, my first experience was good but not amazing. I started to wonder if I’d made a huge mistake. My second day with it I felt much better and my experiences with it also seemed much improved. Third day with it has also been excellent, even more natural. I’m really enjoying it. Here are my initial thoughts and notes for the curious. Don’t worry, next week we’ll be back to the usual format for the Hiro.Report!

A few notes:

* Why?: Why did I get one? Apart from having daydreamed for years about an Apple AR/VR device, and having grown up on sci-fi featuring face computers? The obvious, “Hiro is a giant nerd”-related reasons aside, I invested for a few reasons— I am intending to primarily use the device for work and productivity purposes. As someone who works from home and is often stuck feeling couped up in my little corner office, I’m hoping that the immersive environments will help keep me from getting so antsy for a change of scenery. Further, when I do have to travel, this will be an awesome way to bring my “office” with me— I can have all the benefits of my home, multi-monitor display with me wherever I go. I also took the plunge because I really believe that for better or worse, spatial computing / VR / AR (or whatever you want to call it) will be a very widely diffused technology in our society over the coming decade or two, much as smartphones have done so over the last decade or two. I want to learn the technology, be a native of it, and hopefully give my kids early, moderated, and healthy exposure to the technology as well. (Much like my parents did with me when they invested in early Macintosh personal computers and got us dial up internet connections around the time that I was my children’s age.)

* Passthrough: The passthrough is very, very, very good. It is not as perfect as I was beginning to expect from early reviews. I suspect all the Apple-curated demoes and reviews were conducted in rooms with very bright lighting— which my 1980’s build home does not have. The passthrough is incredibly good, and miles ahead from any other VR I’ve experienced, but you definitely get some motion blur in darker lighting. I will add that your environment makes a big difference. The first time I put on the device I was sitting at our somewhat cluttered breakfast table, and the floating windows were just not as impressive compared to when I tried it out in our open living room. To be clear, this was not a problem with pass through, background objects were not bursting through my apps or anything. It’s just the illusion of floating windows was much more noticeable with more space around them to float in. I also tried to wear the Vision Pro while doing some dishes, and even with all the lights on in the kitchen, it was too blurry for comfort and I took it off… which is too bad, because it would be awesome to be able to put some Youtube up above the sink while I worked. Granted, this was on the first day, when I was already feeling yucky, I may try this again when my head cold is fully gone.

* First Gen Product: The build quality and industrial design is out of this world. It’s one of the most beautiful pieces of technology I’ve ever owned. The software is gorgeous— The VisionOS look is spectacular. And yet, this is still very much a first generation product running a first generation operating system, and many of the apps were obviously built by developers who were not afforded the luxury of testing their apps on the device. Lots of little quirky bugs and crashes, that are all easily fixed with a restart and will assuredly get fixed with software updates over the weeks to come. The most common bug I’ve seen is a very few particular apps just straight up not loading or crashing on launch. I’ve also seen the “immersive environments” just not loading or disappearing from time to time. To be clear though, these crashes are the exception, not the rule.

* User Interface: This is far and away my favorite part. John Gruber described it best in a great piece on Daring Fireball, where he described navigating apps by looking and tapping your fingers as being like using The Force. It really feels like a super power. It’s SO good. And I find myself wishing I could do it when I’m not wearing the headset. I want to look at the lightswitch across the room, do a pinch and flick to turn it on or off. Or look at the TV and pinch and slide to adjust the volume. In VisionOS, you CAN do these things. SIDE NOTE: A fun, seemingly undocumented feature— You can bring windows in close enough that they appear about the size of an iPad screen, and you can reach out and press buttons, swipe to scroll, etc just like if you had a physical iOS device in front of you… but I still prefer using The Force.

* Yo Dawg, I Heard You Like Windows: The thing that just cannot be conveyed well enough in commercials, that really has to be seen to understand, is the amazing 3D window structure of the device. Imagine being able to put a giant (or small) 4K monitor on any surface in your house or office? Then imagine that the laws of gravity don’t exist and you can hang monitors in dead air. And that you can move them and place them as effortlessly as if you and the monitors were all floating along in the International Space Station? This short 1 minute video a user posted to Youtube is one of the better demonstrations of the experience and it still doesn’t totally capture it.

* 3D Entertainment: I’ve tried out a bunch of VR and 3D experiences, and this takes the cake. It is SO immersive. 3D movies look legitimately good, rather than gimmicky like they do in theaters. The custom immersive videos and experiences they created for the Apple Vision Pro are wild, it really feels like you are right there standing in the midst of it. The closer the subject is to the camera(s), the more intimate and realistic the experience becomes, almost as if you could reach out and touch them. The stunning spatial audio speakers built-in to the device also play a part in making it feel like you are truly in a whole other place. I’m eager to see additional content produced using whatever technology Apple is leveraging for these immersive videos— It’s a leap and bound over normal 3D content.

* Sharing Is Caring: One of the biggest frustrations I have with the Vision Pro is how hard it is to share it with others. There’s a great screen casting capability which we use a lot— you can basically project your exact field of vision up onto an Apple TV or laptop screen so others can see what you are seeing. But when your spouse or kids want to try it out for themselves, you have to switch over to Guest Mode and they have to spend several minutes recalibrating the device for their eyes and hands— even if they just took the headset off for a minute and then put it back on. I would love to see a future OS update either simplify that process, or let a guest choose to skip that calibration if, for example, it is already calibrated for them from the last time it was used. I’d say I would love Apple to offer User Profile functionality so a family could all share one Vision Pro, but after years of hoping for this to come to the iPad, I’ve given up hope. That said, Macs still support having multiple User Accounts, and this is priced comparably to a spec’d out Mac Pro, so who knows! ¯_(ツ)_/¯

* Text Editing / Selection: As many have pointed out, trying to finger peck on the virtual keyboard is pretty much a non-starter. It’s one of the few experiences in the device that actively “ruin” the magic. It’s that bad. That said, using The Force (i.e. looking at letters and tapping your fingers together to select them) is remarkably fast and effective. Working with a Bluetooth keyboard is even more efficient. That said, there’s still some OS 1.0-type issues, like inconsistency with selecting text and moving a cursor. They are just not as smooth as they are on iOS or MacOS. These will for sure smooth out with future updates. I should also note that it is entirely possible that my complaints here are the equivalent of someone who has never used a mouse before complaining that the computer is buggy, not realizing that they just haven’t mastered using a mouse smoothly yet.

* Privacy: Something that struck me as odd early on is that my passwords don’t get censored out when I type them like they normally do on any other OS (e.g. Password123 normally is rendered as ******* ). I then realized it doesn’t matter, because I’m the only person who can see my screen! As someone who occasionally has to work on a laptop from coffeeshops and airplanes, I dig the idea of having complete privacy over one’s screen and data. (For what it’s worth: I don’t think I’d hesitate to wear the Vision Pro on a plane, but I’m pretty sure I’m not brave enough to bust it out at a coffeeshop… yet.)

* The Future: As others have said, so many things about the Vision Pro feel like you’re plucking something out of the future and bringing it back to the present. That said, one can’t help but project the trajectory of this product line 3, 5, and even 10 years in the future. I’m confident that software updates later this year and next will dramatically improve the experience and utility of this device, as great as it already is. I get excited thinking about what a cheaper, smaller form factor with even better passthrough video quality will be like- Think the original iPhone compared to this year’s cheapest, base models. I also think with some reservation about the long term implications of more widespread adoption of this technology. I already question our society’s relationship with our screens… What happens when we all start strapping those screens to our faces? Probably some really bad things. Probably also some really amazing things. I’m not smart enough to know which way the scales will tip.

* Should You Get One: I would honestly say if you didn’t pre-order the device either because you just couldn’t justify the cost or weren’t so excited about the product to make a blind leap of faith in it, then you probably made the absolute right call for yourself for right now. I think there will be a lot of people who did pre-order the device returning it over the next week or two. It is amazing, I’m thrilled to have it, and have no regrets at all about it… but I don’t expect everyone to be in the same camp. It is in no way priced for mass consumption yet, and most people other than diehard Apple fans would be too put off by the typical first generation growing pains. If you’re on the fence, I would wait until after you see what software updates Apple announces for VisionOS 2.0 at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference in June this year. It is likely that they have a bunch of quality of life and functionality improvements up their sleeves that will either help you realize you have to have it, or give you the clarity that this is still too far away from being what you could actually justify. This is all to say, no I would not recommend it for everybody yet… For some folks? Absolutely! But most folks will be way happier waiting for whatever the second generation of the VisionOS platform turns out to be.

That’s it for this week! See you next week with a bunch more good links.