Or should I say “our new toy” — as I’m writing this, the tween is poking and swiping her way through visionOS like she’s been doing it her whole life, while I am on the laptop. Not that I mind, since the only way to post to micro.blog on day 1 of Apple Vision Pro is through the online interface. It looks like none of my preferred writing tools — IA Writer, Ulysses, or even the micro.blog app itself — have even checked the box to allow unmodified porting of their iPad app, let alone made a native one.
The lists of essential-to-me software that’s Apple Vision Pro doesn’t yet have is long: OmniFocus and Asana for task management, NetNewWire and Reeder for RSS feeds, WhatsApp for keeping in touch with family in Europe. I am not a watches-videos-on-the-tablet-by-himself type of person, so missing Netflix and YouTube apps was not a big deal even though people seem to have made much of it. Having the almost-complete Microsoft Office 365 suite natively was a pleasant surprise, even though Word kept crashing and Teams kept defaulting to the useless Activity tab.
Note that I am taking the hardware tradeoffs and the “spatial computing” working environment for granted. This alone is a huge accomplishment: yes, yes, I can get from a grainy image of my apartment to the top of Haleakalā with a twist of a knob, now let me do stuff. And the doing of the stuff will be essential in dingy hotel rooms during business trips — of which there will be many this year — so I may as well start figuring out how to make the best of it. But until then, it is a toy.
So with that in mind, here is a list of first impressions:
- The dual loop band felt more comfortable on my head than the cooler-looking solo band, mostly because it stopped the entirety of the headset from resting on my nose.
- Setting up the screens was much less finicky than I thought it would be, and slipping them off an on quickly to, let’s say, use Face ID on the phone was seamless.
- No eye strain that I’ve noticed, but I haven’t used the toy for longer than 30–45 minutes at a time. I also don’t wear glasses and knock-on-wood never had problems with eyesight.
- The pass-through video is a marvel in that it didn’t cause any motion sickness, but it is so grainy and the motion blur from any head movement so obvious that I never felt like I was looking through glass, even thick glass of fogged up ski goggles.
- To walk back what I wrote above: pass-through video shines when it is the backdrop for the crisp app windows that can feel the walls around them and position themselves accordingly. In those moments, when your surroundings are in the peripheral vision, it does feel like those windows are actually floating in your actual room.
- But that doesn’t matter when the most common use case will be, I suspect, completely obliterating your real environment and doing work in a near-photo realistic 3D rendering of a national park. Or watching equally breathtaking immersive 3D scenes from Apple TV’s latest documentary.
- “Immersive 3D” is distinct from 3D movies, more like actually being there than looking at a diorama through a rectangular screen. I suspect it will change filmmaking forever, but then people have said that Segway would change the world so what do I know?
- Personas are as uncanny as you can imagine. If you ever wondered what you would look like as an NPC in GTA or a player in NBA2K, well, for less than four thousand dollars you can find out yourself.
- People who know that I had AVP when I called on FaceTime acted grossed out, those who didn’t ranged from slightly confused (a new haircut? a filter?) to unfazed (oh, you’re using an avatar… whatever for?)
- At the bottom of the uncanny valley the only way to go is up. Which is scary and deserves a post or two of its own.
- It’s the way of the future, for better or worse.