My buddy Dev bought a Vision Pro on launch day, the whole ordeal, drove to the Apple Store at Somerset before it opened, came home $3,499 poorer plus another sixty bucks for the extra headband because the standard one gave him a headache in ten minutes. Two weeks later he handed it to me for the weekend and said "tell me if I should return this before the window closes." I did not tell him to return it. I also did not tell him to keep it. I told him I needed to sit with it for a bit, which is a very on-brand non-answer for me.
Here's the thing nobody in the initial hype cycle really prepared me for: it's heavy. Not "oh that's heavier than I expected" heavy, more like "I understand now why the return stories are everywhere this week" heavy. Twenty three ounces doesn't sound like much until it's all sitting on the front of your face for ninety minutes and your cheekbones start filing a complaint.
I've been watching the return-window discourse pile up the last few days, the buyer's-remorse pieces, the segments showing Apple Store employees processing box after box, the general vibe of people posting about their return-store visit like it's a public service announcement. And I get it now, having actually worn the thing for more than a demo-booth ten minutes. Passthrough is genuinely impressive, the screens are gorgeous, watching a movie in a virtual theater at 2am while my kid slept down the hall was legitimately magical for about twenty minutes. But then I noticed I'd been sitting alone in my living room with a computer strapped to my face while my wife read a book four feet away, and that image stuck with me more than anything the actual hardware did. There's a photo going around this week of a guy eating cereal alone at his kitchen table wearing his, and it got dunked on relentlessly, but I don't think it's fair to single him out. I did something almost exactly that dumb on Saturday morning with a cup of coffee. I just had the decency not to post about it.
Battery life is the other thing nobody mentions until they own one. The external pack lasts a couple hours if you're doing anything video heavy, and it hangs off you on a cable that always seems to be exactly six inches too short to reach whatever outlet you actually want to sit near. I spent a good chunk of Saturday doing laps around my apartment looking for the least awkward spot to camp out with a headset tethered to a wall socket like a very expensive dog on a leash.
Would I buy one? Not at thirty five hundred dollars, no. Not because the tech isn't real, it clearly is, the eye tracking alone is better than anything I've used on a VR headset before, and I've used a few going back to the original Rift kickstarter days. It's that the actual use case for me kept narrowing the longer I wore it. Watching a show alone, fine, genuinely great even. Doing email in a floating window, kind of neat for about a day and then just a normal window again. Wearing it around another person in the room, almost never, because ten seconds in you remember you look ridiculous, and so does the isolation of it, glowing eye simulacrum on the front display or not.
Dev ended up keeping his, for what it's worth, mostly because he travels for work constantly and likes the idea of a private movie screen the size of a wall on a five hour flight. That's a genuinely good use case and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But for anyone sitting in their living room this week trying to decide before their own window closes, I think the honest test isn't the demo. It's whether you can take the thing off in front of someone else mid-session and feel fine about the thirty seconds before that, not just the thirty after.
I'm keeping Dev's for one more night. Mostly to finish the movie. Partly because I still haven't decided what I think.