IThe Vision Pro has arrived in Australia five months after its US launch, retailing for $5,999. At that price, it’s perhaps no surprise that Apple’s staff present it on a wooden tray as if we were in a five-star restaurant.
The staff at the Apple store in Chadstone, Melbourne, then fit the device to your head, match it to your glasses prescription, and get it up and running.
Once you’ve set it up, it’s easy to use. It follows your eyes to point to what you want to click. You tap with your thumb and index finger to click, similar to the gestures on the Apple Watch. You can use gestures to scroll and zoom very easily.
In the brief demo, I was taken through panoramas rendered entirely within the Vision Pro’s screen space, spatial photos, and videos taken with both the iPhone 15 Pro and Vision Pro. One included a young family blowing out the candles on a birthday cake, where it felt so close I could almost smell the candles.
When Apple decided to enter the watch market, I didn’t quite understand it. More notifications on your wrist and having to charge the device several times a week? No thanks.
It is now indispensable to me and has transformed my workout regimen and fitness tracking.
The same may be true for the Vision Pro. After trying it out for the first time, it’s clear that it’s an excellent device with impressive features, but I’m not quite sure what its ultimate purpose is.
The most obvious function is to watch movies or TV shows. The device has a cinema function that makes you feel like you’re in the cinema, and this at a time when fewer people are going to the cinema. There are already over 300 3D movies available on the Vision Pro, including Disney Plus movies.
I have tried other glasses, helmets and various attempts at digital glasses which always seemed very gimmicky to me. I often found them to be very heavy and impractical.
Not that the Vision Pro has overcome all these obstacles: after half an hour of wearing it, it left as deep an impression on my forehead as it did on my mind. paraphrase a great movie.
But it’s incredibly intuitive and works well for immersing yourself in the Vision Pro environment while still being aware of what’s going on around you. The fact that it perfectly matched my glasses prescription made it that much easier.
It can be useful at work. Despite all the ridicule that the so-called post-COVID laptop class (those who work from home with their laptop) has received, I think a higher category of this class could emerge: the Apple Vision Pro class.
I was able to see a class of workers with multiple screens open in Vision Pro, which would allow them to conduct Zoom calls from Vision Pro without the need to have a desktop computer set up at home.
Just keep an eye out for emails that come in with the message “Sent from my Vision Pro.”
As I left the store, Apple staff clapped: a sign that someone had bought one.
I’ve been firmly entrenched in the Apple ecosystem for a while now, with an iPhone, iPad, watch, and a couple of subscriptions. In theory, Vision Pro would be something I could easily incorporate into my life, but at the current price and offering, it’s extremely unlikely I’ll be an early adopter of Vision Pro.
As with everything Apple does, it will all depend on the apps, so we’ll have to wait and see what the developers come up with.