So apparently I'm not the only one who thought the Vision Pro honeymoon might not last. A bunch of outlets have been running stories this week about early buyers already boxing their $3,499 headsets back up and walking them into the Apple Store, and honestly, the reasons people are giving don't surprise me one bit.
The complaints are pretty consistent once you read enough of them: eye strain after 30-45 minutes, headaches, a weird kind of motion sickness some people are calling "digital nausea," and the sheer physical weight of the thing pressing on your face after a while. There's also the more social complaint, which I find more interesting than the physical one, about how isolating it feels to wear a computer on your face while your kid is trying to talk to you or your dog wants to go outside. The EyeSight feature, where your eyes show through a display on the front so people can supposedly still "see" you, apparently does not fool anyone. People have described it as uncanny valley territory. I haven't tried it in person yet so I can't confirm, but that tracks with what Ive heard from a friend who did.
Apple's return window is the standard 14 days, so the timing of these stories lines up almost exactly with the first wave of buyers hitting that deadline after the February 2nd launch. Thats not some conspiracy, its just math. But it does mean the next couple weeks are going to be a real test of whether this thing has staying power beyond the early adopters who preordered at midnight.
Heres my actual opinion on this, and Ive been writing about this exact category of product on this blog since roughly forever at this point: strapping a computer to your face was never going to be a comfortable everyday thing no matter how good the passthrough video is or how sharp the micro-OLED panels are. Apple did genuinely impressive engineering here. The passthrough is apparently the best anyone's done. The hand tracking is apparently excellent. None of that changes the fact that your face has nerve endings and your neck has limits and two hours of any headset, no matter how well balanced, is going to start to hurt.
I remember covering the Google Glass Explorer Edition back when this blog was maybe three years old, and the conversation back then was almost identical minus the price tag being an order of magnitude smaller. People got excited, a small number of true believers wore it everywhere, and then normal humans decided walking around in public with a camera on their face made both them and everyone around them uncomfortable. Glass wasnt a VR headset obviously, different use case entirely, but the underlying lesson feels the same: theres a difference between a device that impresses you in a fifteen minute demo and a device you actually want strapped to your head during a random Tuesday afternoon.
None of this means Vision Pro is a failure, to be clear. Apple sells plenty of stuff at the top end that isnt supposed to move iPhone-level volume, and a chunk of these returns are just the natural churn of any first-generation gadget hitting a returns-friendly retailer window. Some of the people returning theirs will probably be back for version two once it's lighter, cheaper, or both. Ive got a friend whos convinced he'll buy the second one and skip this one entirely, which honestly might be the smartest move available right now if you dont need to be first.
What actually gets me is the price relative to the use case. $3,499 for something that a meaningful chunk of buyers can only comfortably use for less than an hour at a stretch is a rough value proposition even by Apple's usual "we know you'll pay it" standards. I keep thinking about what else that money buys. A very nice laptop and a very nice TV and money left over, easily. For that price the thing needs to disappear on your face the way good headphones disappear on your ears, and by every account I've read, it doesn't, not yet anyway.
Anyway. If youve got one and you love it, genuinely curious to hear about it, my email is right there in the sidebar like its been since 2011. I just dont think Im buying one this generation, and apparently a fair number of early buyers are coming around to the same conclusion a few weeks in.