I spent a week with Apple Vision Pro and I'm

I bought an Apple Vision Pro. $3,500. I had it for a week. I put it back in the box.

That’s the summary. The explanation is more complicated.

What’s incredible

The passthrough cameras are so good that you forget you’re wearing a headset. The real world comes through with clarity and color accuracy that no other device has achieved. I walked around my apartment wearing it and didn’t trip over anything, didn’t misjudge distances, didn’t feel the nausea that every previous VR headset eventually triggered.

The eye tracking is eerie. You look at a button and it highlights. You pinch your fingers and it clicks. No controllers. No hand tracking lag. Just look and pinch. My eyes became my cursor. Within an hour it felt natural. Within two hours I was reaching for the air to click things after I’d taken the headset off.

The spatial computing concept works. I placed a browser window on my kitchen wall, a movie screen floating above my couch, a music player on my desk. They stayed where I put them. When I walked away and came back, they were still there. My apartment became an infinite monitor with windows wherever I wanted them.

The technology is stunning. Genuinely. The best consumer electronics engineering I’ve seen.

What’s wrong

I don’t know what it’s for.

After the novelty wore off (day three), I started asking myself when I would voluntarily choose to put this on instead of using my laptop. The answer was: almost never.

Working in it is good but not better than a big monitor. Watching movies is immersive but I can’t eat popcorn with a headset on. Video calls through it are weird because your avatar is an uncanny digital face that doesn’t look quite like you. Browsing the web works but it’s slower than a trackpad.

Every use case I tried was either equivalent to what I could do without it or slightly worse because of the weight, the isolation, and the 2-hour battery life.

The device is incredible. The reason to use it is unclear.

Technology ahead of its use case

I’ve seen this pattern before. The first iPad was technically impressive and people asked “but what is it for?” The answer took years to emerge: media consumption, sketching, enterprise use cases that nobody predicted at launch.

Apple Vision Pro might be in the same position. The technology is ready. The “why” isn’t. The form factor needs to shrink (it’s heavy). The price needs to drop (it’s absurd). And someone needs to build the app that makes spatial computing necessary, not just possible.

The iPhone had email, web browsing, and maps. Three things people needed every day. Vision Pro has… immersive movie watching? That’s not nothing, but it’s not a daily necessity.

What I think this is

I think Apple Vision Pro is a developer kit disguised as a consumer product. Apple needs developers to build spatial apps, and developers won’t build for a platform that doesn’t exist. So Apple released the hardware, priced it at a level where only enthusiasts and developers will buy it, and is waiting to see what people create.

The Meta Quest 3 costs $500 and does a lot of what Vision Pro does, just worse. But “a lot of the same thing for 7x less money” is a strong argument for most people. The premium that Vision Pro charges is for quality of experience, and quality of experience needs a killer use case to justify the premium.

The feeling after

I took it off after a week and the real world looked different. Not better. Not worse. Different. My apartment, which had been filled with floating windows and spatial content, was suddenly just an apartment again. Static. Fixed. The walls didn’t have browsers on them. The ceiling wasn’t a star field.

It felt limiting.

That’s the most interesting thing about Vision Pro. Not what it is, but how the world feels after. Once you’ve experienced spatial computing, flat screens feel like a constraint. Like going from color TV back to black and white.

The future is in that feeling. Not in the current device. In the feeling of wanting something the current device can barely deliver and the next generation might get right.

I sent it back. But I think about it daily. That might be exactly what Apple intended.

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