Month: July 2024

Why I Bought the Apple Vision Pro—And Why I Am Returning It (UPDATE: NOT Returning It)

This is not the review that I was expecting to write for the Apple Vision Pro.

Last Friday, I took the day off work, and went down to the Apple Store in Polo Park, giddy as a kid on Christmas morning, to pick up my pre-ordered Apple Vision Pro. The demo and walk-through went very well, and I have nothing but praise for the store associate who led me through a basic tour of the AVP’s features. I picked up the eyes-and-hand navigation in no time. I marveled at the technology, declared it worth every penny I had spent, and walked out of the store, bags in hand, feeling on top of the world.

I was told that I was the first person in Manitoba to walk out of that store with an Apple Vision Pro. I wanted to be on the cutting edge of VR and AR. I wanted to be one of the cool kids. I was all set to go.

However.

I am currently at the point where, unless something changes quickly, I will soon be walking back into that same Apple Store, the same bags in hand, with a repackaged Apple Vision Pro and accessories (e.g. a carrying case), to return them all and get my money back.

Why? Well, I’m glad you asked.

I am returning the Apple Vision Pro for one reason and one reason only. During the order process, I scanned a copy of my eyeglasses prescription, since I will be unable to wear my glasses under the face-hugging, ski-mask-like design of the AVP.

When I showed up last Friday to pick up my unit, they cleaned and put my eyeglasses into a machine called a lensometer, which automatically measured my lenses and spit out a code, which then could then use to pull magnetic prescription lenses from the large collection of lenses they have kept in the back of the store, just for the purpose of demos. So, in other words, even though I didn’t have my prescription lenses ready yet, I could still go through the demonstration and walk-through process in store which, as I have said, went swimmingly.

The problem is, that I only have 15 days to return the Apple Vision Pro for a no-questions-asked, full refund. The clock started ticking the moment I left the store. And, as it turns out, my prescription lenses I ordered are currently still sitting in limbo in the United States, and I cannot get a hold of any real, live person at UPS to explain to me why they were unable to deliver them to me today, when they were promised:

All day, I kept refreshing the tracking page, waiting for it to move from “On the Way” to “Out for Delivery.” It never happened. The last status of my order was dated July 13th, showing that my prescription lenses were sitting in a UPS facility in Louisville, Kentucky, where apparently they have been sitting ever since. No word. No updates. No text or email messages with status updates (even though I had set them up).

This is when my nightmare started.

I spent the next few hours this evening trying, in vain, to connect to a real, live human being at UPS who could tell me why my prescription lenses were stuck in limbo. Every time, I landed up in an AI chatbot hell, which sent me in circles.

So I have decided to return my Apple Vision Pro and get my money back, because there is every possibility that my 15-day return window is going to close before I can even use the damn thing! I have assembled it, charged it, and put it on, once—and I can’t see a thing without the corrective lenses I need. I can’t even begin to set it up! The clock is ticking while I essentially have a useless, CA$7,700* paperweight on my hands. And I am getting angry.

Why Apple chose to partner up with UPS to deliver their prescription lenses, and why Apple forces you to order the device and the prescription lenses at the same time, instead of ordering the lenses ahead of time, is something that I do not understand. Maybe once I actually get my hands on my prescription lenses, then I will go back and buy one. But not before.

But I am not going to sit around and wait for UPS to get their shit together, and spring me from AI chatbot jail. I even tried to file a claim, only for it to be rejected, with a reference to the same telephone number with the same AI chatbot I had fought with all evening:

I was quite willing (eager, even) to pay through the nose to be a glorified beta tester for Apple, but not if I can’t even USE the device I bought! This whole sales process is screwed up for people who require prescription lenses, and until it is fixed, they can have their Apple Vision Pro back, and my money can sit in my bank account until they do get their act together. Enough. This is not the level of service I expect from a company like Apple, and the fact they decided to partner with UPS, and their shitty customer service, just blows my mind.

UPDATE Thursday, July 18th, 2024, 9:00 a.m.: My tracking page now looks like this:

Therefore, since I now have absolutely no idea when I can expect my prescription lenses, without which my Apple Vision Pro is useless, tomorrow I will be packing up my device, and returning it to the Apple Store to get a refund within the 15-day, no-questions-asked return period.

UPDATE Thursday, July 18th, 2024, 10:44 a.m.: I have just spent a very frustrating half hour on the phone with the Apple Store in Polo Park, which started by once again being interrogated by an AI chatbot who is pretending to type on a keyboard while telling me to please wait. When I finally got through to a real person, I could not find the original purchase receipt in my email at all, and I had to jump through several hoops in order for them to send me another receipt, which I will be printing off and bringing with me on Friday when I return everything.

I am getting angrier and angrier at this whole experience, and that anger has nothing to do with the specifications of the product itself; it has everything to do with how I am being treated as a customer. UPS gets most of the blame here, although my situation illustrates that Apple might need to rethink how the purchase process might need to be adjusted for people who require prescription lenses.

UPDATE Saturday, July 20th: So, I packed up my Apple Vision Pro and took it back to the Apple Store, where I spoke with both the business manager and the store manager. They told me that they wanted me to take advantage of the full 15-day return window, and therefore would not start the clock until my prescription lenses are released from limbo in Louisville and are in my possession!

Therefore, I took my boxes back home, and now we are working from both sides (mine and the store’s) to figure out why there has been a delay in delivery, and how to fix it. (Please note that all this happened before the Crowdstrike outage, which apparently is also affecting UPS. As of this morning, the status on my tracking page is still “The delivery date will be provided as soon as possible,” and they are still stuck in Louisville, Kentucky, where they have been sitting since July 13th.)

UPDATE Tuesday, July 23rd: Well, today UPS updated the tracking page for my prescription lenses to a status of Delay, with the message: “We’re sorry for the inconvenience. If you are the sender, please check with the receiver to confirm delivery. Otherwise, you may start a claim to provide a resolution.” In other words, UPS seems to have lost my lenses.

I once again tried to file a claim, filling out several pages of information on the UPS website, before I once again got the same error message as I did last week, which referred me back to their 1-800 telephone number and AI chatbot hell. After yelling at the chatbot for half an hour (which, apparently, has not been trained on the phrase I WANT TO MAKE A CLAIM), I finally got connected to a real, live human being in the Tracking Department, who referred me on to a woman in the Investigation Department, where I learned that it is now up to the sender (i.e., Apple, or perhaps Zeiss) to start an investigation into what went wrong. So, I have dutifully relayed all the information this women gave me to my contact at the Apple Retail Business office at their Polo Park store.

At this point I am ready to tear my hair out in frustration. It doesn’t help that I have also been fighting with both my bank and Canada Revenue Agency this week, over a mistake which my former financial planner made in 2022, leading to fines I have to pay for all three of the 2022, 2023, and 2024 tax years. This thing with Apple was the cherry on top of a shit sundae, a very bad week overall. But I digress.

So far, this has been a horrible customer service experience, easily the worst one since I tried to get my Valve Index VR headset repaired when it broke. As a result of that experience, I swore that I would never, EVER purchase a Valve Index VR headset for the virtual reality lab project I am currently working on for the University of Manitoba Libraries, because even though I like the Valve Index hardware, God help you if anything should go wrong, and you have to try and get support for a problem, or (God forbid) you want to talk to an actual person about the problem you are having.

Valve’s entire support system is set up to hinder, not help you, and keep you from talking a real person, much like the UPS setup (and, for that matter, the Canada Revenue Service). I might be able to forgive, but I will not forget, and my current experience with Apple, Zeiss, and UPS, is shaping up to be similar to my Valve Index debacle. (I note with a feeling of harsh satisfaction that my blogpost outlining my nightmare support experience with Valve shows up in the first page of Google search results when you search on “valve index support.” At least, it does for me. Your mileage may vary.)

You give Auntie Ryan a poor customer service experience, trust and believe that everybody will hear about it, sweetheart! (Or, as I often like to say, “I am that bitch.”)

At this point, Apple is going to work with the investigation team at UPS to find out what the hell happened to my first order, and we have already placed a second, replacement order, which is due to arrive July 27th to 29th. And Apple will issue me a refund for the first set of lenses, which we now assume are lost in Louisville. And I have received an apology both from the Apple Store, and from UPS, for the incovenience and hassle. So, now we wait.

*cost of a 1-terabyte Apple Vision Pro, two years of AppleCare warranty coverage, a carrying case, plus provincial and federal sales taxes (equivalent to US$5,628 at today’s exchange rate)

IMPORTANT HOUSEKEEPING ANNOUNCEMENT AND APOLOGY: Why I Am Putting The RyanSchultz.com Blog on the Back Burner for the Foreseeable Future

When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp.

—Modern proverb, possibly Cajun

A picture of the equipment setup in the temporary virtual reality demonstration room in Elizabeth Dafoe Library, with a Meta Quest 3 headset (left, the white headset), and the Vive Pro 2 headset with the “wand” controllers (centre front, the black headset). You can see on the wall-mounted computer monitor behind them a view of the Sansar world No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man – 2nd Floor, a gallery experience by the Smithsonian.

So, as you might have noticed, I haven’t been blogging very much lately (again).

There are a few reasons why, chief among them that I have been through a library move. The building which houses the university science library where I work full-time has been closed, and both the staff and collections have been moved to other locations. The building is going to be completely gutted and renovated over the next 2-1/2-to-3 years. Moving a large library is a MAJOR undertaking, folks! And just days after the move in June, as luck would have it, we hosted a science librarians conference, which had attendees coming from all over North America. The last month has been hectic! I haven’t even had an opportunity to unpack most of my moving boxes in my new office!

But another reason why I haven’t been writing much lately is that the virtual reality lab project I am working on is starting to ramp up. While plans for the necessary room renovations for the future home of the XR (Extended Reality) Lab are proceeding (with a projected ready date of January 2025), I have been given a smaller room in the main arts and humanities library to set up a temporary virtual reality demonstration room, equipped with a wireless Meta Quest 3 VR/AR headset, plus a Vive Pro 2 PCVR setup, attached to a Windows PC with a good graphics card (see image above).

I have been spending most of last week and this week previewing and reviewing a curated selection of apps and experiences, and drafting a “menu” for both the Meta Quest 3 and the Vive Pro 2, which I will be giving to Libraries staff so they can decide what VR/AR experiences they would like to have. Most of them are brand new to virtual reality and augmented reality, so I still need to work out the best procedures for giving these demos, and cleaning the hardware between users, helping them avoid VR sickness, etc.

In fact, I have spent so much time hopping in and out of various VR apps to draw up the menus, that I have often given myself VR sickness, something which surprised me, as a virtual reality veteran! I have been using a wide variety of headsets since January 2017, and I am usually able to be in VR for two hours at a time!

I discussed this at the first meeting of the University of Manitoba VR/AR/MR/XR Group (a new group I helped organize, for U of M faculty, staff, and students working in virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, extended reality, spatial computing—and whatever other umbrella term they come up with next!), and the head of the computer science department told me that, in his opinion, part of the problem is that many newer app developers don’t put the same amount of care and attention into designing affordances that the earliest VR apps had. He has a good point.

In other words, some VR/AR developers are just throwing stuff together using the new and improved content creation tools, without really doing proper testing. I do think that there is some merit in this idea, based on my own experience over the past two weeks. So I am finding that I am having to take breaks from all my VR/AR activity until the nausea passes. And it has reminded me that I definitely need to keep VR sickness top of mind when giving demos!

Along with off-the-shelf apps (educational and non-gaming, although some apps might have a gamification component) from both the Quest store (for the Meta Quest 3) and the Steam store (for the Vive Pro 2), I am also including in my menus some examples of educational worlds which people have created in various social VR platforms. Some examples are the NASA Apollo moon-landing exhibit in Sansar, The Universe microscopic-to-macroscopic experience in Resonite, and the Ancient Athens Acropolis and Agora worlds, which have been moved from AltspaceVR to VRChat. There’s a lot of content out there! I want Libraries staff to be able to experience as much of it as possible, to get a sense of the possibilities of this technology. (Right now, I am focused on free apps and experiences, but eventually I will have a budget to purchase software.)

So, I have been extremely busy, and sometimes I do feel a bit overwhelmed. Quite often, when I come home from work, the last thing I want to do is sit in front of a computer, and especially put on another virtual reality headset! So my trusty Valve Index, with the Knuckles controllers, is quietly collecting dust on my computer desk at home.

So I apologize for the lack of blog posts lately, but as you can see, I’m trying to keep a lot of plates spinning at the moment! I am going to have to put this blog on the back burner for the foreseeable future. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Kandyan Plate Spinners (CC BY-SA 2.0 Antony Stanley, from Flickr)