So Vision Pro preorders opened Friday morning, January 19th, at 8am Eastern, and by the time I actually rolled out of bed and checked my phone the ship dates had already slipped past the February 2nd launch day. That's how fast it went. Apple's selling the base 256GB model for $3,499, and if you want the Zeiss prescription inserts or the extra battery or literally anything else, the real number creeps a lot higher than that pretty quick.
I had the page open. I want to be honest about that. I had it open in a tab for about forty minutes, alt-tabbing over to it between emails like it was going to change my mind for me if I just looked at it long enough. It didn't. I closed the tab a little before ten and went and made coffee instead.
Here's my actual problem with it, and its not really about the money even though the money is obviously absurd. I still have an Oculus Quest 2 sitting in a box in my closet that I have used maybe six times since I bought it in 2021. Six times! I know because I remember most of them individually, that's how rare they were. Beat Saber for an hour, showed it to my sister at Christmas, tried one flight sim demo and got nauseous, and thats basically the whole history of that device in my house. Its a genuinely well-made piece of hardware and it mostly just sits there being a $300 paperweight with a strap.
So when I think about spending eleven times that on a headset, the pitch has to be a lot more convincing than "its from Apple and the passthrough is really good." And from what I've read (and I havent used one, nobody outside Apple has really used one long enough to say anything definitive yet) the actual killer app still isnt obvious to me. Watching movies on a big virtual screen is neat for about twenty minutes and then you remember you have a TV. Working in it for eight hours sounds like a great way to give yourself a headache and a stiff neck, not a great way to be productive. Maybe Ill be wrong. Ive been wrong about hardware before, I said the same dismissive stuff about AirPods before I owned three pairs of them.
Two days before this, Samsung had their Unpacked event out in San Jose and announced the Galaxy S24 lineup with all their new "Galaxy AI" features baked in, on-device live call translation being the headline party trick. I watched maybe four minutes of that stream before getting bored, which probably says more about me than about the phone. Circle to Search looks like it could actually be useful in a way that a lot of these AI-branded features arent, honestly. We'll see.
And then completely unrelated to any of that, on Thursday the Peregrine lunar lander finally burned up over the South Pacific after basically limping along for two weeks with a busted propellant tank, which meant it never got anywhere near the moon it was supposed to land on. I found that story more interesting than either of the gadget launches if Im being honest, and almost nobody I know even mentioned it to me. A private company built a spacecraft, launched it on a brand new rocket, and it broke within hours of separation and they spent the following two weeks doing science with whatever instruments still worked before letting it come home and burn up on purpose. Thats a wilder week than anything that happened at a Best Buy preorder counter, and it got a fraction of the attention.
Anyway. If you did preorder the Vision Pro, I want to hear what it's actually like once it ships, unfiltered, not the Apple-approved demo version. Leave a comment or email me. I'll be here with my dusty Quest 2, feeling smug and slightly poorer in spirit if not in wallet.