Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not

The lack of proper VR controllers excludes AppleVR from any meaningful gaming anyway.

And porn

I’m a huge tech nerd, but even I’m struggling to see the genuine use-case for VR.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d be overjoyed to be proven wrong, for someone to come out with a killer app and for VR to suddenly become essential, but right now it just feels like a way to get people to spend significant amounts of money paying for tech firms to do r&d. At most, I love the idea of having an enormous personal screen for movie watching, but I watch movies with my wife, so we’d have to spend a ridiculous amount of money to sit next to each other in our personal bubbles.

My partner is a big VR fan and he's excited to get his Apple Vision Pro, but he's already planning on returning it once he gets bored of it. This seems like something that only hardcore Apple fans would want to buy and keep. Nobody wants to watch movies or use their computer while isolated from the world while having a heavy thing strapped to their face. I don't doubt that this is the best way to watch movies in VR, but if watching movies in VR was a non-niche thing that people actually wanted, it would have already caught on by now.

I quite like the "virtual workspace" idea (that Apple didn't have first, but they are having a go at it).

But it's not really there yet, is it? The apps are mostly iPad apps, some obviously updated to take advantage of "spatial computing" (how Apple calls it) in very cool ways, but it's not like I can run a full-blown development environment on that thing. Even with a Mac you can only protect a flat screen into your "space".

Let's give it a few years and see where Apple takes this on a software level. I think the hardware is okay for a "gen 1" device, but it'll likely get lighter, faster, longer battery etc.