visionOS Diary: Work it
It’s been a busy few weeks around here, what with Apple’s latest platform updates and new iPhones, but I finally have time to catch my breath and talk about the most important of topics: the Apple Vision Pro.
We’ve already established that the Vision Pro is a “whoa” device that can be a great place to watch a movie, chat with friends, or even just browse the web for a while.
But most of us probably don’t spend the majority of our days entertaining ourselves—more’s the pity. And hey, this is a product with “Pro” in its name, for all of Apple’s various definitions of what exactly that word means. If the Apple Vision Pro is going to have some staying power, if it’s going to fit into my daily life, then it needs to help me get things done.
So, I’ve tried using the Vision Pro for a variety of work tasks over the past few months. I’ve written in it. I’ve revised. I’ve even edited a podcast. I’ve put it through its paces. I’ve tried to get things done. And while it does offer some capabilities that you won’t find anywhere else, that emphasis on “tried” has all too often been well-earned.
Immersion therapy
If there’s a singular advantage to the Vision Pro over any other device offered by Apple, it’s the ability to escape your surroundings. Working in an immersive environment like Joshua Tree or Bora Bora1 can help you get a fresh new perspective on your task and even let you block out distractions and focus more on what you’re doing. Heck, I edited a podcast on Jupiter.
I really do love the immersive environments; it’s the number one thing that brings me back to the Vision Pro. But even they aren’t all upside. They can feel a bit static after a while—one reason that I’m intrigued about Jason’s visionOS 26 theory that the Jupiter environment, where there is actually a passage of time, might be a tech demo for more advanced environments in the future.
There’s also the matter of why there aren’t more. I’m not sure how difficult it is to create environments, but they feel like such a big selling point of the Vision Pro that whatever time and money Apple is spending on them isn’t enough. Once you’ve cycled through all the environments—and I’m not counting the various “light” filters, which are clever, but not especially compelling—the novelty starts to wear off. Sorry, we’re humans and we crave novelty! Making environments themselves more dynamic would certainly be one way to address this, but I feel like we should have another half dozen options by now—or, of course, the ability to bring those third-party environments out of their apps.
Immersion also has some inherent challenges in the everyday environment. For example, writing is thirsty work. Usually, I’ve got a cup of tea or a glass of water or a can of seltzer on my desk. Trying to find that in an immersive environment is a painstaking matter at best, a disaster waiting to happen at worst. Yes, you can dial back the immersion, but doing that every time you want to take a drink is a bit ridiculous. It’d be nice if there were some sort of passthrough, not unlike what the Vision Pro already does for keyboards and—with more mixed results—your iPhone. Even then, drinking in a Vision Pro requires a degree of precision, lest you knock your glass into the headset itself. Call me picky, but I really prefer not spilling hot tea all over myself.
Why are things so heavy in the future?
The Vision Pro is heavy. You know this. I know this. Every single piece ever written about the Vision Pro makes this known. Despite Apple’s best attempts to mitigate the weight with a variety of straps and clever engineering, it’s kind of unavoidable. Even when I feel like I’ve had it set up well—and I swear, I don’t touch the straps!—it’s a total crapshoot whether it feels comfortable the next time I put it on. I suspect this is as much about me—am I tired? Did I sleep well last night? Am I slouching or sitting up?—as it is about the persnickety nature of the fit.
But the fact remains that wearing it for any length of time, as I’m likely to do when editing a podcast or writing, is tough. Your face starts to hurt. And after your face starts to hurt, you start wondering if that pain is worth the tradeoff you’re making. Maybe it’d be better to just go back to your Mac or iPad. And sometimes, I have to admit, it’s a relief to pull it off and just look at my Studio Display.
Alas, the only real solution for this is for Apple to make a lighter version. Unfortunately, we may be waiting a while: recent reports suggest that work on a lighter version has been postponed to focus on smart glasses.
The right tools
But if there’s one thing holding me back more than any other from working on the Vision Pro, it’s the tools. Or, more specifically, the lack thereof.
In some ways, the current state of the Vision Pro reminds me of the very earliest days of the iPad, when “doing work” meant you had to either find new apps that took the places of those you used on your Mac or come up with clever workarounds to make your workflows function.
Let’s take an example: Dropbox. I’ve used the cloud storage app for years on my Macs and other devices to share files between devices as well as with several of my collaborators. But there’s no Dropbox app on the Apple Vision Pro. If I even just want to look at one of my files in Dropbox, that means using the web interface. And if I need to edit it? Get out of here. I’m not going to download a file to my Vision Pro, alter it, and reupload it. The whole point of Dropbox is the integration with the rest of the file system. Even a bare bones app that just unlocked the ability to access Dropbox in the Files app would go a long way to making life easier.
Likewise, I rely on Google Sheets for several organizational tasks, especially related to podcasts. But not only is there no app version of Google Sheets, either—not that it’s such a great app on iPhone or iPad, to be honest—but the web version also doesn’t work very well: it’s very slow, it’s difficult to click on controls, and sometimes editing doesn’t work. That means I can’t even do certain simple administrative tasks on the Vision Pro, like update our rundown sheet for Clockwise.
These are basic productivity tools and thus perhaps the most egregious examples. Personally, I don’t understand why third-party developers who are clearly not going to spend the time to develop a native visionOS version of their app don’t simply enable the iPad versions of their apps on Vision Pro to provide at least some functionality. And I don’t want to excuse Apple here, either: most of its own apps aren’t visionOS native, and some aren’t available at all. I’m looking at you, Preview.
Other existing apps that I rely on haven’t made the jump either. I’m hardly surprised that there’s no BBEdit or MarsEdit for Vision Pro—it’s not like they’re on iOS or iPadOS either—but there is a surprising dearth of text editing apps with Markdown support native to visionOS. Runestone is one of the few, and while it’s a very nice app, it’s not what I use on other platforms, so it means adapting my workflow. Image editing software doesn’t fare much better. For both of these, you can turn to iPad versions, which are fine, but they are limited in a variety of ways, not least of all the restrictions in window size that don’t let you take full advantage of the Vision Pro’s huge real estate.
The podcasting end of things is even more of a non-starter. At the risk of stating the obvious, I don’t think you’d even want to record a podcast using the Vision Pro: there’s no real way to connect an external microphone, and even if you could, you’d probably just risk smashing your face into it. Then you’d have to figure out how to use headphones. And after all of that, well, then you could deal with the total lack of software tools, from Rogue Amoeba’s excellent audio apps down to the command line apps I use to line up my audio tracks. Editing doesn’t fare much better; you won’t find Logic Pro or Ferrite in visionOS’s App Store, either in native Vision Pro form or iPadOS versions.
So, for my aforementioned podcast editing experiment, I ended up having to rely on Mac Virtual Display. Which, don’t get me wrong, is great. Blowing Logic up to full screen and having it hover there in a wide or ultrawide window that’s far bigger than my Studio Display is genuinely useful when dealing with that app and its manifold buttons, sliders, and widgets. But it’s also a tacit admission of failure that I have to basically fall back to the Mac. If all I needed was a larger display, then I could just buy a larger display. And if all the Vision Pro was providing that kind of experience, then aren’t the rest of its capabilities just overkill?
All play and no work
Again, I’m brought back to those early days of the iPad. It took that device a long time to outgrow its humble beginnings and reach parity with the Mac—some would argue until this very fall, more than 15 years after its debut. Good news: having finally put the old “can you get work done on an iPad” chestnut to bed, it’s time to move on to “can you get work done on the Vision Pro.”
Look, if I need someplace to get distracted watching classic Star Trek episodes on a tiny television while sitting on the beach, well, you have my number, Vision Pro. Just don’t ask me to fill out that spreadsheet. Despite its ambition and how much it can do, the Vision Pro still feels like it has a way to go when it comes to the fine art of getting work done.
- Great on a chilly day, believe me. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the sci-fi spy thriller The Armageddon Protocol, is out now.]
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