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I’m writing this on Vision Pro with my MacBook Air’s display thrust into the beautiful surroundings of Bora Bora.
It’s been a while since I’ve done this. Regrettably, for the last few months, my Vision Pro headset has been sitting unloved and unused in the camera cabinet at the Mark Ellis Reviews studio. I unearthed it briefly to try out visionOS 2, but then remembered how awfully uncomfortable it is to use, and promptly forgot about it again.
The tech industry at large appears to have done the same. So few people are talking about Vision Pro. Content that’s made about Apple’s headset draws only the smallest of passionate audiences (or those hurling ridicule). It is, seemingly, a product that is dying. Fast.
Or is it? Can we call Vision Pro one of the biggest failures or non-events of 2024? The fact that my YouTube videos on the ‘new’ version of AirPods Max drew in seven times the audience compared to the videos I’ve made about Vision Pro suggests we can.
There is more to the story, though – starting with visionOS 2.
Hello, visionOS 2
If you’re a Vision Pro user who, for some reason, hasn’t yet updated your headset to visionOS 2, I’m happy to report that it’s actually quite a big upgrade.
You can now turn existing 2D photos into spatial photos. I have no idea how it does this, but it works incredibly well. I’ve tested the feature with a bunch of regular photos of my son that were taken with my iPhone 16 Pro Max and the results are jaw-dropping; there’s suddenly depth, movement, and even more clarity. It’s features like this that, while a solitary experience (another Vision Pro issue) reveal the sheer capability of the headset and the team behind it.
It’s just a shame that the new Photos app is such a mess.
The new hand gestures are cool (if, I think, borrowed from the likes of Meta Quest). Hold up your hand, turn your palm to face you and a little circular button appears which can be pinched to take you back to the home screen. You know, like the old iPhones. Flip your hand around, and you get access to a mini control centre with battery life, time, Wi-Fi status, and access to volume controls. It’s intuitive and responsive.
I mentioned the new Bora Bora immersive environment earlier, and it is indeed one of the loveliest fake places to get work done in visionOS. I just wish we had more.
Keyboard Awareness is a hidden gem in visionOS 2. Previously if you fully immerse yourself in an environment, everything in the real world would disappear, including your laptop’s keyboard. Not any more – visionOS 2 recognises it and reveals it for you, without sending you fully back into the real world. It works for standalone Magic Keyboards, too.
You can now watch web videos in Safari in any virtual environment and on a massive, standalone display. You couldn’t do this before, and without native YouTube or Netflix apps, it’s a neat sidestep by Apple to provide an experience that Meta Quest users have enjoyed for a long time. And what an experience it is. Once again, solitary, but the ability to chew through my YouTube watch list on a big display that hovers just above the sandy beach in front of me is rather lovely.
If you’re interested, I proclaimed the Meta Quest 3S as a £290 marvel…
Apple has even improved the guest mode in visionOS 2, which will be very welcome news for any Vision Pro owners who have gone through the rigmarole of placing their headset on the heads of family and friends. Guest hand and eye data are now saved for up to 30 days, thus requiring far less faffing each time they want to try it. And they will – trust me.
But one of the biggest updates in visionOS 2 once again confirms what Vision Pro’s killer app is: integration with the Mac.
What are the 5 worst thing about Apple Vision Pro?
The killer app remains
Ever since I imported Vision Pro from the US in February and first strapped it to my head, I’ve made it abundantly clear what the main use case is likely to be for most people. Known as Mac Virtual Display, it’s the ability to extend your Mac’s display into the visionOS environment. It was great before, but visionOS 2 takes things up several notches.
There’s the aforementioned keyboard awareness, but Apple has also improved the clarity and resolution of the virtual display. It’s immediately noticeable; it wasn’t bad before, but the new version is incredibly crisp and beats anything else I’ve tried in the VR market.
There’s more, though – literally. Just above the extended Mac display, there’s now a drop-down box which offers three options – Standard, Wide, and Ultrawide. Set it to wide, and the display expands to what feels like a regular ultrawide monitor, thus offering lots of very useful additional screen estate. Set it to ultrawide and your Mac display suddenly wraps around you providing, essentially, two 4K displays, side-by-side. The clarity and resolution are retained and you can move the display back and forth and resize it accordingly.
Set the ultrawide display to the maximum size and it is comically big. Way too big for yours truly, but for anyone who considers themselves a serious productivity fiend, it’ll be heaven.
This update to the Mac Virtual Display is so good, that I can see myself using Vision Pro more often – particularly given the addition of the aforementioned web video viewing; it’s starting to feel like a far more usable device.
What’s Apple Intelligence?
Final thought: is Vision Pro a failure?
Vision Pro is still really heavy and really expensive. Neither of those things is likely to change for quite a while.
Rumours suggest that Apple has abandoned production of the current Vision Pro model in favour of focusing on a ‘cheaper’ edition. The only problem is that they are, allegedly, facing challenges reducing the component costs without sacrificing key features.
As a result, whisperers within the industry are telling us that we might not see another visionOS headset (be it Pro or otherwise) until 2027.
Yikes.
Of course, these are rumours and could be absolute twaddle. We won’t know anything for sure until Apple does something publicly. One thing I’m pretty sure we do know, however, is that Tim Cook doesn’t want Vision Pro to be a failure. He’s surely entering his twilight years at Apple and it’s clear that Vision Pro was intended to be a lasting legacy of his tenure as CEO. Can you really imagine Apple canning it or quietly ushering it out the back door like they did with AirPower? I can’t.
I can also still see the potential of Vision Pro. Because I’ve seen it. The visionOS 2 updates I’ve mentioned today are really impressive and genuinely useful or enjoyable. Just like Vision Pro itself, they’re a glimpse at what the future could be, and I’m here for it.
The question remains, though: will the world wait for Apple on this one?
