EDITORIAL NOTE: In writing this blogpost, I have only used generative AI one time (to help me remember the actual names of Steam VR Home and Meta Horizon Home, typing in a description of what these environments do into Anthropic’s Claude AI to obtain the actual names).
I do not rely on using GenAI tools to write or edit my blog posts, unless otherwise specified in a note such as this, at the top of the post. And yes, I have been regularly using an em dash in my writing long, long before ChatGPT came along! 😉
I was surprised to discover, finger-swiping and pinching my way through the Apple Vision Pro subreddits I follow using the Pioneer for Reddit app (while in the Apple Vision Pro, of course!), that the Apple Vision Pro was already celebrating the two-year anniversary of its release in the United States. We Canadians and citizens of about a dozen other countries were only able to get our hot little hands on AVPs later, of course (I had a particularly tortured road until I finally was able to use mine, as explained here, including several frustrating and time-consuming incidents trying to communicate with both Apple’s and UPS’s AI-powered chatbots in efforts to speak with an actual live human being). But, as usual, I digress.
I have been thinking a lot lately about why I am so enamoured with my Apple Vision Pro, and how it compares to the many previous Windows PCVR and standalone VR/AR headsets I have used since January 2017 (Oculus Rift, Oculus Quest 1/2/3, Valve Index, Vive Pro 2). Also, I have been thinking a lot about how I have been using those different headsets, and again, why my use of the AVP has been such a radical departure from previous virtual reality gear. So this blogpost is my attempt to summarize all those thoughts, and get them down on—hmmm, well, not paper, exactly, but pixels?—to share them with you, my faithful blog readers. (By the way, I very much appreciate those of you who do actually take the time to read my ramblings!)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
—Arthur C. Clarke
First, the technology of the Apple Vision Pro makes the device feel magic, and I still feel that sense of awe and appreciation while wearing it every day. Shortly after my first week of use, in a message I first excitedly shared with my friends on Second Life, first quoted here on my blog, I stated:
The Apple Vision Pro makes every single VR headset I have used to date feel like one of those red plastic View-Masters I used to play with as a kid in the 1960s. The “screen door” effect so evident in earlier VR headsets (where you can see individual pixels, making everything slightly blurry) is COMPLETELY, UTTERLY gone.
After decades of working on Microsoft Windows computers, I used the Apple Vision Pro (and in particular, what I consider its killer feature, Mac Virtual Display) to switch almost completely to macOS and the Apple ecosystem. Let me walk you through a typical workday. I arrive at my cubicle in the librarian’s shared office space, turn on my MacBook Pro, and unpack and set up my Apple Vision Pro. I remove my prescription eyeglasses, put my AVP on, adjust the straps across the back and top of my head for a comfortable fit, and select my usual environment, Mount Hood, the tallest mountain in Oregon:
I can adjust how much my chosen Environment blends with my cubicle office space, by twisting the knob on the upper right of my AVP. Most times, I like to have it set up around 90-95%, so that I feel I am surrounded by forest, with the lake and Mount Hood to my back, but enough of the real world still pokes through so I can, for example, easily grab my insulated Winnipeg Folk Festival coffee mug (with an environmentally-friendly metal straw, so I can take a sip more easily while wearing my AVP!). When I use my Apple Magic keyboard, it automatically highlights itself as my hands hover over it, pulling itself out of the forested ground when I look down. Everything just works. It’s magic.
Usually, I have the Apple Music app pinned to my right side, and I select a playlist (usually instrumental new age music, but it can vary depending on my mood).
I pop in my Apple AirPods, and then look at my MacBook Pro. A virtual Connect button hovers over the MacBook Pro’s screen, I tap my finger and thumb together to select it, et voilà! A large, adjustable ultra-high-definition screen appears over my desk, a sharp, crystal-clear wide screen where I can rearrange my macOS windows to my heart’s content: Outlook for email, Word for whatever report I am working on, my latest PowerPoint presentation, my Firefox web browser, etc.
I now spend between four and six hours of my workday in this productivity cocoon. If I need to get up (say, to reheat my coffee in the microwave), I unplug the AVP battery from its power cable, place the battery in my left front pocket, and walk around the office. I exit the Mount Hood environment, which remains in place like a virtual office partition. If, on my way to the microwave, I happen to look behind me, I can still see my huge Mac Virtual Display, and the Apple Music window hanging in midair at my workstation.
This setup gives me two things: focus and pain relief.
First, the ability to isolate myself (literally, throwing an immersive, three-dimensional virtual environment around myself) gives me the ability to focus on the task at hand, and I find it helps with my overall productivity. I can even get into a much-desired flow state. (Interestingly, the second-edition Apple Vision Pro with the higher-end M5 processing chip seems to have completely alleviated a problem I had with the original-model AVP, which was I would develop eyestrain after at about the two-hour mark while using it with the Mac Virtual Display feature. The new dual-loop Dual Knit headband is also an improvement over the original, single-band knit headband.)
Second, I have a couple of deteriorating joints in the cervical part of my spine, which unfortunately limits how much time I can spend sitting in front of a desktop computer monitor and keyboard. I have noticed that I can work for longer periods of time, with less neck and shoulder pain, when using the Mac Virtual Display feature on my Apple Vision Pro with my MacBook Pro, than I can in any other workstation setup (including just my MacBook Pro with an external monitor). I am truly grateful that the technology is now sufficiently advanced to help alleviate my pain!
As far as I am concerned, the Mac Virtual Display feature is THE killer app on the Apple Vision Pro. While I have been browsing the AVP subreddits and downloading and installing various apps, I find I use the Virtual Display far more than any other app or program (at least, right now). No other VR headset can give me what the AVP offers, or even come close. The thousands of dollars I have spent on the first and now second editions of the Apple Vision Pro over the past two years have been worth every. single. penny. I cannot imagine living and working without this device.
With all the Windows PCVR and standalone VR/AR headsets I have used, I had always been hopping between one app or another (usually a metaverse platform like Sansar or VRChat, because that is my personal hobby and my research interest). I spent very little time in places like Steam VR Home, or the Meta Horizon Home, where you can see your library of installed VR/AR applications and games, launch them, and switch between apps. But in the Apple Vision Pro, with the Mac Virtual Display feature, I find I am using the device more like a filter or environment through which I am doing actual work with pre-existing programs like Microsoft Office, as opposed to loading and running virtual-reality-native apps. You can see immediately how this is a big difference. I would never for a second even think of using my Meta Quest 3 headset to edit a document in Microsoft Word, or fire off an email, yet I do those sorts of things without a second thought in my Apple Vision Pro.
Which leads me to my next important point: why the relative lack of AVP-native apps and programs is not as serious a problem as it would appear at first glance. When you use the device as a filter, or an environment, as you do with the Mac Virtual Display feature, you are using it with the much richer library of apps and programs available on macOS. Add to that the thousands of iOS apps you can run in flat-screen mode on the AVP (e.g. Firefox, my go-to web browser), and you can see why I am not too terribly concerned about this issue.
But it would appear that many consumers are concerned at how (relatively) slowly new, native-AVP apps and programs are being added to the Apple App Store. In a post made four days ago to the r/VisionPro subreddit, someone asked:
So I finally pulled the trigger and bought an Apple Vision Pro, and honestly… wow. The hardware is insane. The display, hand tracking, eye tracking, immersion – it genuinely feels like a glimpse into the future. Watching films, browsing the web, even basic spatial apps feel miles ahead of anything else I’ve tried.
That said, I can’t shake one big concern: developer support is thin.
Right now it feels like there are hardly any apps that are actually built for Vision Pro. Yes, iPad apps technically work, but that’s not the same as native spatial experiences that really show off what this thing can do. After the initial “this is amazing” honeymoon phase, you start noticing how limited the ecosystem still is.
My worry is this: if Vision Pro doesn’t gain real traction, Apple could quietly scale it back or pivot, and developers will have even less incentive to build for it. That becomes a vicious circle — fewer users → fewer apps → even fewer users.
I really want this platform to succeed because the tech absolutely deserves it. But at the moment it feels like we’re relying on Apple’s long-term commitment and patience more than anything else.
Curious what other Vision Pro owners (or devs) think. Are we just early and impatient, or is the lack of native apps a genuine red flag?
This question sparked some developers and other users to weigh in, with some very insightful commentary, which I wanted to share here with you:
I think Apple knew this going in and that’s why this device is almost like a prototype in a way. They need it in consumers hands to know what it will turn into. They knew the price point wasn’t for general consumption, but the only way to mold this thing into a future device for the masses that has better battery, less weight, and more importantly, costs less, was to get it into the hands of people and watch it do its thing.
Hi,Vision Pro developer here. Long response incoming (TLDR at bottom). You and other users have responded with what I think is a correct analysis that there’s an economics issue in that people won’t buy the Vision Pro until there’s sufficient app support, while developers can’t afford to make a dedicated Vision Pro app until there’s a sufficient user base. I can maybe provide some more perspective on some other aspects of Vision Pro development.
I truly believe that spatial computing is the future of computing, but it won’t be with the current version of Vision Pro. Essentially, I see this iteration of Vision Pro as a (very) cool device for media consumption and a dev tool. In the future, Apple (or some other company, but my money is almost always on Apple) will likely release the product that breaks through with consumers, whether it be the upcoming glasses or some vastly improved Vision Pro, and then developers will begin work making the apps for that eventual product. My personal development projects on Vision Pro are done with the certainty that they will be made at a financial loss to myself, but in the hope that learning how to build streamlined apps and leverage the capabilities of the current device will allow me to be better positioned to be a developer for the breakthrough model. As a developer, this is the time to be experimenting with 3D user experience, to learn what works and what doesn’t as an interaction model for experiences as immersive as Vision Pro allows.
There are also problems with what Apple allows developers to do. In truth, there’s very little freedom to push the device to its limits and make something really imaginative and unique. Apple has set out strict privacy considerations (which are good broadly speaking, but might be overkill at this point) that lock developers into predefined paradigms that Apple approves of. Of course Apple’s own apps don’t have to obey these restrictions, which allows them to make apps that feel magical, like Experience Dinosaurs. Having attended the Vision Pro Developer conference for the past two years, I can tell you that there are significant frustrations among the developer community over the restrictions Apple has placed.
From where I’m sitting, I think the interest among developers for Vision Pro is reasonably high, but most can’t afford to build for it until there are some big changes in the market. I think in the near future there won’t be more than a smattering of new native apps, mostly made by the passionate developers who see the potential, but once Apple releases the product that clicks for consumers the dam will open up. This will probably result in a flood of apps for this current generation of Vision Pro, as I think Apple has nailed the software side of this, and just needs to work on building a physical frame that consumers want to put on their head.
TLDR: Be patient. At some point spatial computing will likely take off on a future Vision Pro-like model, and then the developers will come.
Developers aren’t going to invest heavily in the platform until there’s more users. Apple knows this. Apple is getting the OS and dev tools maturing while they work towards more consumer-friendly versions of their Vision line. They needed the hardware out and in user and developer’s hands to really start moving forward. Traction will come, I sincerely don’t think there’s anything to worry about there.
I agree wholeheartedly with the second commenter, the developer who stated that “people won’t buy the Vision Pro until there’s sufficient app support, while developers can’t afford to make a dedicated Vision Pro app until there’s a sufficient user base.” It’s a classic chicken or the egg problem, which is why what I siad earlier is so important. The number of available apps and programs for the Apple Vision Pro doesn’t really matter at this point (at least, for me), because I am pretty much using it as an immersive environment through which I am running other programs. To date, the only native-AVP apps I have been running regularly have been the previously-mentioned Pioneer for Reddit app, InSpaze, and Explore POV! (I have, however, been avidly collecting dozens of free and inexpensive AVP apps based on recommendations posted to the r/AppleVisionPro and r/VisionPro subreddits! One day, probably when I am on my upcoming research and study leave, I will start to explore more AVP-native programs and apps. In fact, two days ago, Google finally released a version of its popular YouTube video-watching app for the Apple Vision Pro!)
As I said up top, Mac Virtual Display is the killer feature I use most often. And that is what makes my use of the Apple Vision Pro so dramatically and drastically different from previous VR/AR headsets. It’s a productivity tool first, and with my continuing neck and shoulder pain, it’s also been a pain management tool second, an unexpected but not unwelcome way to get through an eight-hour workday with as little discomfort as possible. I am eternally grateful that the technology has actually evolved enough, just in time, to help me still be productive despite my pain! And for those two reasons alone, it is worth every single penny I have spent on this device. As I said before, I am all in.
