I love this thing, not because it's flawless or anything,

it is far from flawless,

but because it's actually interesting.

Like, don't forget the last two, three years

of Apple Product review comments are just,

"That's boring, oh, it's just a spec bump,

there's nothing really new here,

oh, they hardly change anything

or try anything new these days."

But this, this thing is interesting.

It's risky, and most of all, it's new.

Now, it's actually not fundamentally new,

it's a VR headset, but it's new for Apple.

And there are a bunch of things in here

that are new in a way that only Apple would try.

And just as interesting as this individual product

is the possible future that this implies.

Like, when you get a first generation product like this,

you sort of automatically assume

that there are goals for its future,

that it'll have another generation

and another one after that,

and that there is some goal

for what this will turn into 10 years down the road

because we saw what happened with the iPhone

and the Mac and the iPad

and all sorts of other first generation products.

And on top of all of that, as far as I know, Apple has never

released any other first generation product

with the word Pro already in the name,

which comes with a whole nother set of implications.

So is the world ready for all of this?

Let's get into it.

(upbeat music)

So I might be one of the 20 people outside of Apple

who has been using the Vision Pro

the most over the past two weeks.

Like, I've spent hours in this thing with both bands,

with multiple Macs, in different setups, different rooms,

indoors and outdoors, lightness and darkness.

There are parts of this thing that are absolutely amazing,

unparalleled, best I've ever seen.

But the reason it's so interesting

is because it's actually new

and there are downfalls and flaws and trade-offs

that come alongside all of this stuff.

So at the end of the last video,

I gave you guys a sort of a preview

of my pros and cons list.

If you haven't already watched that video,

it is definitely worth watching,

almost like a prequel to this one.

It is a 30 minute monster all about how to use this thing,

how it works, what's inside, what it's capable of.

And then, at the end, I got to my upsides,

which are immersiveness, placement and space,

eye tracking and hand control,

passthrough, ecosystem, and spatial audio.

And the downsides, which are weight and comfort,

the eyes on the outside,

app selection right now, battery life, and price.

So, okay, for starters,

I wanna amend immersiveness to fidelity,

I think that's more accurate here.

I have used a bunch of different VR headsets now,

and this Vision Pro has the sharpest,

best looking micro-OLED display out of all of them.

The size of individual pixels on these displays

is seven and a half microns,

which means you could fit 64 of them

in the size of a single iPhone screen's pixel.

You can't see individual pixels,

there's no screen door effect, it's awesome.

The native refresh rate is 90 hertz

and it will crank up to 96 hertz

when there's 24 FPS content playing to be an even multiple.

And Apple says that they calibrate

every single one of these Vision Pro displays

from the factory for maximum color accuracy.

They're really good,

and this is a big reason why this headset is so expensive.

But then, and this is gonna be a recurring theme here,

the Vision Pro runs up against the technology of today

not being quite advanced enough

to accomplish what they were probably hoping as ideal.

So in the case of these screens, right,

they're amazing, there are so many pixels,

but because there's so many pixels,

the computer inside cannot actually render everything

in high resolution all the time at 90 Hertz.

So instead, it does something clever.

It combines the insanely fast eye tracking

with what's called foveated rendering,

meaning, it's only actually rendering in high resolution

exactly what you're looking at when you're looking at it.

The rest is soft and fuzzy.

That actually works really well

because that's exactly how our eyes work.

It's really clever, like you don't think about it,

but the thing that you're looking at at the moment is sharp,

but then the rest of your peripheral vision

is soft and fuzzy, and that's fine.

So really, now, all of the computing work is being done

to track your eyes as fast as possible

so that there's no lag between

when you look at something and when it becomes sharp.

Fun fact, you can actually see this

in screen recordings from the Vision Pro.

You can see the piece of the screen

that I'm looking at is sharp,

and then everything else around it,

even parts of the same window are fuzzy on purpose.

But to my eye, that looks totally natural

because I'm focusing on one thing at a time.

I found that you can also screen record

with developer mode in Xcode, and that'll make the clips 4K

and it'll render everything in HQ all at once.

But every time I did that,

it would be choppy and scrolling would be slow and jittery.

And I'm thinking that's just because

the computers aren't really used to rendering everything

in high quality all the time.

So it looks like a higher quality recording,

but the second I did any scrolling, it didn't look as good,

so I just didn't use those recordings as often.

So the screens are great,

the position tracking of objects and space are great,

the eye tracking is incredibly good.

The one ding against immersion on the Vision Pro though,

and not a lot of people are talking about this,

but it's the field of view.

See, the first few times you use this headset,

you don't even really think about it that much.

You're so distracted by all the fun and the newness

and how cool it is that your eyes are controlling the thing.

But eventually, you start to poke around the edges

and it turns out, you know how people are saying

it kind of looks like ski goggles from the outside?

Well, it also kind of looks like ski goggles

from the inside a little bit too.

Again, the middle is super sharp and incredibly impressive,

but if I can do my best here through a YouTube video,

the edges of the headset are a little bit further in

than the edges of your vision.

And so, there's a little bit of like a cone effect going on

and there's some chromatic aberration around the outside.

So you kind of have this slight feeling

of looking into a large tunnel at everything.

There are actually no field of view numbers

published by Apple anywhere about Vision Pro,

as far as I can tell,

and I kind of think that's on purpose

because I have noticed from using them both

that the Quest 3 has a better, wider field of view

just looking inside the headset.

So if I could change one thing about the Vision Pro

to make it more immersive,

it would be a wider field of view, no question.

(upbeat music)

Vision Pro has the best passthrough of any headset

I've ever used, that much is super clear to me,

and weirdly enough,

this doesn't actually surprise me either.

Maybe because this is one of the products

that makes it so obvious

that they're thinking a lot about the future,

like Apple talks a lot about AR

and how they want things to just be clear

and just overlaying things onto your real world.

But with today's technology,

again, that's not quite possible yet.

So instead they have a VR headset,