Albert C. Lee

Early thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro (I ended up buying directly in store last evening). I'm about 3 hours in, between late last night and this morning. The first major thing that must be said is WOW - the visual clarity is way beyond anything that came before. But, a bit unexpectedly, this is so in some strange mixed way - your surroundings (the passhtrough) are a bit blurry and even a tiny bit laggy. But anything rendered fully virtually, e.g. a screen is very sharp and easily readable. Super cool. I mean, just the simple experience of arranging a few windows around your living room and moving around them is incredible. I feel very creative thinking through and designing my ideal setup of all the apps in my space. Mind is blown and goes places. The second major thing is a bit less upbeat. This launch is not like the other Apple launches. It is off-brand. It is selectively and inconsistently either highly polished, or highly raw/undercooked, poorly throught through, janky or even straight up buggy. It's like some parts of the org get an A+ and some get an F. Or it's like some of them had 4 years to work on their part, and some had 4 months. It's like it was rushed a bit to "just ship" and basic UI/UX interactions weren't finished, thought-through or debugged. Jank Let me describe a bit some of the jank. The setup was a bit too long and janky for me. At one early point you're asked to bring your unlocked iPhone close, but you can't unlock your iPhone because your face is obviously covered so FaceID doesn't work... ?. Then I had some error connecting the phone to it so I had to go through "manual" setup. Then the sound wasn't working until I rebooted. Then I got an iMessage from a friend and I was shown a notification inside the Vision Pro about it, but when I clicked into iMessage app, it was fully empty - where is the message? When launching Guest Mode to show a friend, nothing tells you that you're supposed to also press the digital crown to activate. Very simple interactions are buggy - e.g. in the app store when I select an app to preview it and then hit back, I'm forced to for some reason go back 10 times through previously previewed apps to get back to the main screen, some bug or something. My Disney+ app never opened, it just spins forever, I'm not sure how to launch this app. When you launch Apple TV, there is zero indication or recognition of the fact that you're inside Vision Pro. No featured content, no custom content, no text indicating anything, no nothing. I'm not sure, I thought there would be a few surround videos or something? Also my brain: "$3500 for a Vision Pro? Yes two please! $9.99 for AppleTV+? Absolutely not." More generally, as you access Apple apps, a lot of them are just ignoring that you're inside a Vision Pro, and just pretending like nothing happened. I'd want new Spatial Content and interactions to be 100% front and center and featured. The "copy pasting" of stuff seems pervasive. The raw Spatial Computing OS is there, but it's almost like the OS is all there is. The apps that take advantage in any way of "Spatial Computing" seem few and are somehow also hard to find and/or not prominently featured. There's the little blue guy app who you can poke and he laughs. There's the jet engine app, which is kind of cool, but I wasn't actually really learning anything, it felt gimmicky, like an early demo. There are some really cool environments, but why are there only 5 of them?. There's what seems to be some early grifter content on the app store, from people trying to sell you e.g. a super basic looking watch app that just shows time, for $2.99. The ability to look at your laptop and just "connect" worked the second time, and it was glorious, wow. Your screen just shows up in your living room and you can use the keyboard/mouse. Very cool. The Vision Pro is sadly a little bit too heavy and it doesn't "disappear" due to this, even with the double strap (which is essential). I feel a bit pressure from the device on my head. But it's okay, we're at the edge of what is possible. A bunch of other small things. The world shakes a little bit with every step, especially if you land a bit harder on a heel. You have to unlearn and relearn some UIUX, because your eye gaze is now your active pointer. So you can't just look somewhere else a bit too early, before you "click" it. It's very cool that the eye tracking is so high quality. Anyway, I'm rambling. Conclusions. The hardware itself and the core Spatial Computing OS aspects exceed my expectations. I loved sprawling on my couch, opening up a few windows, and I half-watched a movie while scrolling through web. I loved pacing around my room arranging my digital work/entertainment space. I FaceTimed a friend and we laughed about how silly my digital avatar looks, haha. I pulled up Music and played the only thing I have in it - that U2 album that was given to everyone back in 2014. nice. I'm very happy with this early preview of what could be possible, and using the current experience as a prompt to explore it. Few recommendations to Apple come to mind: 1) eliminate simple bugs and jank. 2) fight early grifter content by featuring very very prominently any apps that are actually good, don't use dark patterns, are ideally free to try, and acknowledge in any way that the user is in a Vision Pro. 3) Consider a free subscription of AppleTV+, or maybe a $100 app gift card to those who purchase Vision Pro, so people don't lock up (?). It feels bad to pay that much money just to get in, and then immediately feeling like you're blocked behind additional pay walls, for experiences that could very well be very very raw and undercooked. 4) In general, feature a lot more prominently any content that is actually designed for spatial computing. I don't want to just put up iPad apps around me. I am simultaneously wearing a revolution in computing, and the software to actually show me around is not just absent but what is there is mildly janky and annoying. Ok, this concludes the section where I just "wing it" based on what I'm seeing, going in fairly blind, over the first ~3 hours. I will now do a bit more research, read more, watch some videos/tutorials, and come back for round 2.