Day Fourteen
Two weeks ago this morning, a bunch of very online people lined up outside Apple Stores at 8am to hand over $3,499 (plus tax, plus another $200 if your eyes are as bad as mine and you'd need the Zeiss inserts) for a ski-goggle computer that nobody, including Apple, seemed totally sure how to describe. "Spatial computing." Sure. Today is day fourteen. For a lot of those early buyers, today is also the last day of the return window.
I don't own a Vision Pro. I tried one for about twenty minutes at my friend Dev's place last weekend, which was plenty. Not because it's bad, exactly: the passthrough is genuinely uncanny, like someone piped a slightly-too-crisp version of the room into your eyeballs, but because after ten minutes my face started aching in a way I wasn't expecting. Not my eyes. My face. There's a spot right where the front glass rests on the bridge of your nose, and I've seen enough photos going around this week of people with a red dent there to know it's not just me. Somebody on Threads called it "Vision Pro face" and now I can't unsee it.
The return stories have been piling up all week, and I think today's the actual deadline that's forcing the issue, not some coordinated backlash. Fourteen days from a launch-day purchase lands right about now, and Apple's policy is Apple's policy no matter how much you paid or how cool your Persona looked doing it. I've read a handful of these "why I'm sending mine back" posts and they mostly land on the same three complaints: it's heavy in a way that becomes obvious after 45 minutes and not before, the battery puck on a cord is an annoyance nobody warned you about clearly enough, and there just isn't enough to actually do with it yet that couldn't be done on a laptop and a decent monitor. One guy said he used it mostly to watch a basketball game alone in his living room and concluded that was a $3,500 way to watch a basketball game alone in his living room. Hard to argue.
Here's my honest, unhedged opinion, and I know this puts me at odds with about half the tech commentary I've read this month: I think the people returning theirs are making the correct call, not the timid one. There's this weird pressure in tech media to treat a return as some kind of failure of nerve, like you didn't "get it," you didn't see the vision (pun regrettably intended). But paying full price to beta-test hardware isn't a moral obligation. It's fine to try something remarkable, notice it doesn't fit your actual life, and take the L on a couple hours of your Saturday instead of the $3,499.
That said (and this is the part reviewers keep underselling) the passthrough thing really is a different category of impressive than anything I've tried before, including the Quest 3, which I do own and mostly use to play Beat Saber badly. It's not that Apple's tech is bad. It's that "impressive demo" and "worth keeping in your house" are two different bars, and a fair number of early adopters are discovering today that only one of those got cleared.
My unrelated gripe of the week, since I'm apparently in a complaining mood: can we stop calling every headset launch a "verdict on the metaverse"? Meta's been trying to make that word happen since 2021 and it still hasn't happened, and Apple didn't even say it once at their own event. Let the poor word rest.
Anyway. If you bought one on day one and you're reading this at your kitchen table right now weighing whether to drive back to the mall before close, I don't have a tidy answer for you. Depends what you actually did with it these past two weeks versus what you imagined you'd do with it. Those are rarely the same list, and today's the day you find out which one was real.