So I finally did the thing. Tuesday afternoon I drove out to the Apple Store to do the guided Vision Pro demo, because apparently you can't just walk in and buy one off a shelf like a normal product: you book a 25 minute appointment, they walk you through it step by step, and then they very politely ask for it back. I'd been putting it off since launch day (that was last Friday, the 2nd) mostly because the store near me was booked solid all weekend.
A few notes, in no particular order, because that's how my brain processed the whole thing.
The setup takes forever. Before you even get the headset on your face there's a whole process: Optic ID (which is basically Face ID but for your eyeballs), then this thing called a Light Seal fitting where an employee holds a little measuring tool up to your face like an optometrist. If you wear glasses, which I do, you either need to bring your prescription for the Zeiss inserts (extra $99-$149, which is insane for a lens attachment) or you just deal with slightly blurry text for the whole demo. I did not bring my prescription. Regret that.
The display is genuinely the best thing I've seen on a screen, and I mean that specifically. The dinosaur encounter demo they show everyone is a little cheesy but the moment it broke through the wall of the room I actually flinched, which hasn't happened to me with a screen since I was a kid. Micro-OLED panels apparently pack something like 23 million pixels total across both eyes and you can tell. Text is razor sharp. Nothing about the visual quality feels like a first-gen product.
Everything else about wearing it feels like a first-gen product though. It's heavy (north of 600 grams depending on the band) and you feel it on your face within about ten minutes, not two hours like some reviewers are claiming. My cheeks had a mark on them after I took it off. There's a whole subplot online right now about the "Vision Pro red mark" on people's noses and I can confirm it's a real thing, not internet exaggeration.
Typing in it, for the record, is genuinely bad. You either use the little floating keyboard and peck at it with your eyes and a pinch gesture, which is slow and kind of exhausting, or you pair a real keyboard, at which point I have to ask what exactly I'm doing wearing a $3,499 face computer to type an email.
Here's my actual complaint though, and it's not really about the product: the Apple Store employee doing my demo had clearly said the phrase "spatial computing" so many times that day it had stopped meaning anything, to him or to me. I get that it's the marketing line. I just wish for once someone at these things would say "it's a VR headset with really good screens" and let that be enough.
Also (small tangent, but relevant to the week) apparently a decent number of people who bought one on launch day are already returning theirs. Fourteen day return window, and I've seen a bunch of posts (Reddit threads, a couple of viral tweets) from people saying it gave them eye strain, or made them motion sick, or that after the novelty wore off on day three they just couldn't think of what they'd actually use it for besides watching a movie alone in a dark room, which you can do with a $400 headset from three years ago. I don't think this is some huge indictment of the product. First versions of ambitious things are always going to have a return spike. But it's a real, measurable thing happening right now, not just launch week hype.
One more small thing from this week while I'm here: Google renamed Bard to Gemini yesterday and rolled out a paid tier, Gemini Advanced, for twenty bucks a month bundled into this new "Google One AI Premium" plan. I can't keep track of how many times Google has renamed this product at this point. Assistant, then Bard, now Gemini. At some point the naming instability starts to say something about how confident they actually are in any given version of it.
Anyway. I'm not buying a Vision Pro. Not at that price, not for what it currently does well, which is basically "watch things and occasionally be amazed." Ask me again in three years when it's the size of sunglasses and costs half as much. That version I'll probably want.