Initial Reviews of Apple Vision Pro Emerge

The first reviews for Vision Pro are live, highlighting a ton of great, good and not-so-great things about Apple’s first mixed reality headset.

The $3,500 Vision Pro is set to launch on February 2nd, but it seems the first reviews are already out from a select number of outlets, including CNET, The Verge, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC.

CNET’s Scott Stein took the lead on the Vision Pro review, lauding the headset for its clear micro-OLED display, mostly fluid hand-eye control interface, great mixed reality capabilities, impressive list of compatible iOS apps, and chance to view spatial video captured both on iPhone 15 and the headset itself. On the flipside, Stein criticized the $3,500 price tag, imperfect hand-eye input, lack of native VisionOS apps, cabled battery, and lack of space for glasses, requiring special prescription inserts instead.

Nilay Patel from The Verge called it “magic, until it’s not,” echoing many of Stein’s highlights and concerns in addition to noting that video passthrough wasn’t perfect, the 3D avatars for video calls, called ‘Personas’, are uncanny “and somewhat terrifying,” and criticizing the social isolation of not being able to instantly share what you can see with others in the room.

Joanna Stern of The Wallstreet Journal took it to a new extreme by wearing Vision Pro for nearly 24 hours straight (that’s a tight review embargo if we’ve ever seen one). On the positive side, Stern notably didn’t puke, got a lot of work done, and cooked a delicious meal, but also thought Personas were weird. Apparently you’re not supposed to cook when using Vision Pro (knifes, boiling water, and all that) but being able to look up a recipe, have a floating timer, and watch a tutorial video while you cook sounds pretty handy.

CNBC’s Todd Haselton calls Vision Pro “the future of computing and entertainment,” as Haselton was the only one of the bunch to actually like the Personas feature in addition to headset’s strong suit: serving up traditional media. Still, Haselton says it lack key apps such as Uber, DoorDash, Amazon, and Facebook, and popular mobile games likes Diablo Immortal and Genshin Impact.

We’ll eventually get ahold of a Vision Pro for another one of patented deep-dive reviews, so make sure to check back soon. We’ll be going through a lot of the things others haven’t mentioned, such as how the FOV stacks up against the competition, passthrough camera limitations, display and optical artifacts, and also what sort of apps you would expect as an XR enthusiast, developer, prosumer—whoever. That, and more.