By Jason Snell
February 3, 2024 3:16 PM PT
Answering a few early Vision Pro questions
Like everyone else—okay, not everyone, but I’d guess a surprising percentage of the Six Colors audience—I took possession of an Apple Vision Pro on Friday. I’ve already spent many, many hours using it, but it’s a whole new Apple platform and it’s going to take me some time to digest it all.
In the meantime, I’ve gotten a bunch of questions from readers and listeners about the device, so I thought I’d make my first piece about the Vision Pro an FAQ story. You’re reading it now! (Apologies if I re-use some of these observations in my eventual full review. Recycling is good for the earth.)
How do you connect a trackpad and keyboard?
Like pretty much any Apple device, you can directly connect a Vision Pro to external pointing devices—at least, you can connect the Magic Trackpad and some Bluetooth keyboards. I was able to get a Magic Keyboard connected to it simply by opening the Bluetooth area of the Settings app and selecting the Magic Keyboard. It really couldn’t have been easier.
Once a keyboard and trackpad are connected, you can mix and match those input devices with the input from your gaze and hand gestures. If you’ve ever used a pointer on an iPad, you know how it works—there’s a little dot that will dance from window to window, and it behaves just like the pointer does on iPadOS.
If you’re using the Vision Pro with a Mac, it’s even easier to connect input devices—because your Mac’s own pointing device and keyboard will also extend into the visionOS environment via Universal Control. (I guess we need to add Universal Control to the list of Apple features that might have been secretly developed with visionOS in mind?) For example, just as I wrote this paragraph I received a new Slack message, via the Slack app running on the Vision Pro. I used my Mac’s trackpad to move the pointer off the edge of the Mac display and into Slack on the Vision Pro, where I clicked on the message and even typed a reply.
I don’t understand how you can work in a large visual environment if you’re in a tight space. Doesn’t that break your brain?
With the exception of your hands, windows in visionOS occlude objects in the real world. This means you can put windows deeper than actual space. And yeah, it breaks your brain a little if you think about it. If it really freaks you out, the best answer is probably to dial in an Environment, because all of those have been artfully composed to not have any occluding objects anywhere within range.
This is hard to get across in flat screenshots, but I was able to sit a desk in my son’s room, right up against the wall, and place a window deep behind behind the posters on the wall. The discontinuity didn’t really bother me. Then again, visionOS space is so weird that my brain may have already noped out and turned itself off for the day.
Isn’t it weird that eye tracking means you can’t look at one thing while you’re doing something else?
This question refers to an interesting phenomenon that a lot of us are discovering as we start using the Vision Pro: Turns out that we cut corners! You finish one task over here while moving your eyes to the next task… only to discover that in an operating system that uses eye tracking to assume intent, you’ve potentially disrupted the first task prematurely.
I don’t know how this is going to all play out in terms of extended use, but I’d bet that it won’t take too much time for people to get used to the concept that your gaze is your pointer. It’s also quite possible that people who are committed to doing real work on a Vision Pro will want to bring a keyboard and trackpad with them, at which point the device kind of becomes a big 3-D iPad you wear on your face.
Can you really do work on this thing?
Sure. If you’ll prefer it to other devices really remains to be seen. If you connect it to a Mac, you can do anything you do on your Mac while wearing the Vision Pro. If you don’t, as long as your key iPad apps are available, you can pretty much do everything you can on an iPad. And believe it or not, people do get work done on the iPad.
For “real” work do you think you’d be using pass-through or immersive?
Look, everyone’s brains are different. I sometimes put headphones in to write articles even though there’s nobody around, because something about the isolation shifts my brain into a different gear. I can see how dropping out your normal environment and replacing it with something else might be helpful for productivity. I have tried to work in the Vision Pro in both scenarios, and I don’t think I’ve settled on an answer.
Do streaming apps do clever things with screen shape?
Yes indeed! One benefit of having windows that are unbounded by the shape of a physical screen is that they can be the shape they need to be. So I was able to call up an old 4:3 X-Men cartoon on Disney+, and the screen was indeed 4:3. Likewise, the Max app displayed Casablanca in an appropriate 1.37:1 frame.
I’m curious about the quality of the virtual screen. Like how good does it look?
To test this, I sat down at my Studio Display and then connected to my Mac and re-sized the resulting visionOS window to match the size of the Studio Display. Neat trick, but no—the resulting window isn’t as good as seeing your display with your own two eyes.
The Vision Pro isn’t going to be a display replacement in that way, but it doesn’t need to be. There are plenty of scenarios where you just don’t have a big screen available. I can now work on a MacBook Air screen with a vastly large amount of screen space, for example—even if the resolution is a little bit lower than if I used the native display. (And of course, in addition to the Mac screen, I’ve got several ancillary windows floating in space to the right, left, and above the Mac’s virtual display.)
If you don’t have room for a big display, or can’t bring one with you, having a virtual one can be a big benefit. But if I was just sitting at my desk working on my Mac with connected Studio Display, I’d just use my display.
Do apps persist across sessions?
Yes, but not reboots. Which, if you think of it, is kind of a bummer—if you go to the trouble of placing a bunch of Widgetsmith windows exactly where you want them throughout your house, the last thing you want to do is lose them when you reboot. Apple’s going to have to re-think the concept of geographical persistence as visionOS evolves.
Reboots aside, apps do live in physical spaces. I left my Settings app in the other room yesterday. (Relax, you can summon left behind windows if you need to.)
Can you lie down on your back and watch a movie on the ceiling like Tim Cook and have the back of your head be comfortable?
Sure. I watched 20 minutes of Moana while staring up at the blue sky and clouds above Joshua Tree and it was so tranquil and comfortable that my wife thought I was asleep.
How is the video quality compared to, say, the Meta Quest?
I have a Quest 3 and it’s not even close—it’s safe to say that the displays in the Vision Pro are the best ones available to consumers today. Movies look great, and Apple’s immersive videos are spectacular.
Could you take the Vision Pro on a trip with no iPad or MacBook?
Probably, though I doubt I would. This isn’t a device you should use around other people, so I’d probably still bring one or both depending on what kind of trip it was. Using this with a Mac so that I’ve got a big display wherever I go would be pretty awesome, actually.
If you walk behind a big window, what’s on the back?
Nothing. It’s just a featureless rectangle.
How fast can you type on the virtual keyboard, compared to gazing at letters and pinching?
The problem with taking typing tests while typing via gaze is that you can’t see what you’re supposed to type next! Text input on Vision Pro is a real problem. Apple’s floating keyboard gets in the way and I’m not sure either method really works effectively. Voice sure seems to be a better option here, but even that needs to be executed better than it currently is.
If you’re doing a lot of text input, use a bluetooth keyboard or Universal Control.
Can we take Apple at its word that this is a “spatial computer” you can do stuff with? What is it like actually to do things with the interface, and what is your sense of the power/utility/limits of this spatial interface metaphor?
This is the kind of stuff I will need to address in my full review. What I will say after a day and a half is that the Vision Pro is most definitely a computer. It feels like the most computery device Apple makes, after the Mac itself. A lot of that is the fact that it’s got a freeform multi-window interface.
Unlike most headsets in the market, the Vision Pro is not a games console. It’ll play games, and movies, and may even do well at both—but you can play games and watch movies on your Mac, too. That doesn’t change that it’s also a full-fledged computer. So is the Vision Pro, in a lot of ways. Whether people will want to take advantage of those features, that’s the real question.
Did you write this story entirely while using a Vision Pro?
Yes, all but this last bit and inserting all the images.
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