I don't mind the headset itself, although as many reviewers have noted, it's too heavy to wear comfortably for long periods. (My longest Vision Pro session was three hours and I felt a little hungover afterwards.) But there are many other annoying hardware problems. Carrying an external battery around is a shame, it doesn't work well in dark or dimly lit rooms and there's no good way to enter text, so if you want to use Vision Pro for any type of text-based work, you have to use a Bluetooth keyboard.
The Vision Pro also lacks some basic features. You can't make or receive phone calls with it, like iPhone users can with Macs and iPads. Vision Pro is only compatible with Apple's Magic Trackpad, not Bluetooth mice. And guest mode, the way you show the Vision Pro to your friends when they ask you to try it themselves, is a disaster. (This week, Apple announced that the next version of the Vision Pro operating system, coming this year, will have improved mouse support and a better guest user experience.)
But the biggest disappointment with Vision Pro is how few good apps there are. Several months after its debut, there is still no native YouTube or Netflix app. There is no Spotify, no instagram, no DoorDash. (You can still use some of these services in a web browser or use unofficial third-party apps, but it's a worse experience.)
Some of these apps are missing due to corporate infighting. (Google and Meta, for example, have their own VR ambitions and presumably don't want to give Apple's product a boost by creating apps for it.) But others amount to a lack of trust. Developers don't want to create apps for platforms no one uses, and their reluctance so far (only about 2,000 apps have been developed for the Vision Pro, Apple said Monday) says something about the device's lukewarm reception.
Apple has also been slow to update its own offerings for Vision Pro, such as a series of “immersive videos,” filmed with special 3D cameras and released through Apple TV. These videos, which included a prehistoric nature film and a “rehearsal room” video of Alicia Keys and her band performing a song, were designed to showcase the Vision Pro's high-definition graphics and its “spatial audio” feature. ”, and they are among the best things you can do with a Vision Pro.
