Inside the Vision Pro Reviews: Praise, Criticism, and Everything In-Between

Vision Pro review Roundup

Magic and a revolution but definitely unfinished. I don't know. How do you guys

want to do this? Like we could go, I mean, I could literally go through piece by piece

and talk about the parts that people like, but I also am open to us just having

a roundtable of what we've heard so far. Any votes? Hand up if you want me just to go

through this piece by piece, or if you have some pieces that you want to talk about now, raise

your hand. I have a few thoughts, but I feel like we can do this more open-ended

Okay. Tell you what, let me breeze through these quickly. And then we can just move on to, I guess, the consensus, right

So, Vision Pro reviews roundup filled with praise and criticism. Let's see here

There's a lot to like. The Vision Pro is stunning compared to other VR headsets, which are largely plastic and often

downright goofy looking to the Verge. I was telling the fellers here before we started, I was actually surprised at the Verge's

review. Everyone, people are motivated to be positive about products that they review because they

get early access. And I would say the Verges review was probably one of the most, I would say

moderate reviews. Like they actually didn't seem to pull very many punches. And that was a really

interesting review to watch. And Nilai Patel, I actually have to give him credit. Like, he really

he was very positive on parts and then very negative. on other parts. Like so negative

In fact, I was like, oh man, like I wonder if Apple will continue giving the verge early access to these products

because of how negative he was in some parts of the Vision Pro

But he also had a lot of positive stuff to say. So maybe it all equals itself out. Vision Pro wears look at tiny micro-oids screens and they are better than 4K

They pack 23 million pixels each. Yes, we know all that. displays help remove the screen door effect that is common in lower cost headsets like the META Quest 3

And you can see the pixels as you look through. That's where you can see the pixels as you look through the headset, notes, CNBC

You can easily read text on a website or a book in the Vision Pro. And I was able to watch movies, including 3D on screens bigger and nicer than any TV in my house

Now, I want to add something to this. One of the things that I found surprising and this is something that the Verge review said was when you looking through the Vision Pro you actually can see the edges of the screen

and it creates like a vignette effect. So you're not just looking at a screen unencumbered, and it feels like you're free

like looking at this real world experience with this thing on your face

It almost looks like you're looking through goggles, and you can see the boundaries of the screen

and they said besides the vignetting, which if you don't know what that means

it means like a really darkening at the edges of the screen. They also said that the edges of the screen

were kind of blurry, which I think is something that you mentioned, Griffin, like they're not rendering the entire image

in the fidelity that they use for like the very center, like where you're looking

like they render the edges at a lower resolution. Weren't you saying something like that

Well, they use foveated rendering, which does that dynamically. So if my head is still facing the same direction

but my eyes look to the far left or the far right

then the opposite side of the screen will be rendered at a lower resolution. And that was something that Nilai Patel actually noticed

and he commented on it. I don't know, he didn't talk about foviated rendering

but he could tell that parts of the screen just didn't look sharp, which I thought was interesting

Like in theory, you shouldn't be able to notice that foveated rendering is happening at all

because your eyes can only look at one spot in one time. Well, maybe your eyes

You can't move them in separate directions the same. time like I can. It took me years of practice

Let's see here. With Vision Pro, your eyes are all you need

Said the Wall Street Journal, there are no hand controllers. The other thing Apple is proud of is the hand and hide

The hand and eye tracking control system, which is light years beyond any other consumer hand or eye tracking systems out there

The verge, the Apple Vision Pro feel, I can't talk today. The Apple Vision Pro feels revolutionary because of how easy it is to operate

But again, going back to Nilat Patel, he was like, part of what's interesting about using the Vision Pro is like you have to constantly be aware of where your hands are because that's how you control the Vision Pro

And it was kind of like an unusual sensation to like always have to make sure that you could place your hands somewhere where the Vision Pro cameras, which are underneath the actual goggles, could see your hands so that you could operate it

And sometimes he found that to be a little bit cumbersome. Let's see here

Limited selection of native software. Some people mentioned I mean look Yeah that not surprising I mean when a new computing paradigm comes out even when a new game console comes out they launch with a selection of software that is usually first party

and then it takes a while for third party software developers to catch up. Lion Hartow from the chat is saying

The Verge didn't even update their device before reviewing, had the apps in alphabetical order a bunch of nobs

Really? Okay. Okay, well, there you go. So maybe, and Apple did just release, I think, Vision OS 1.0.2

So maybe there have been updates since they did their review, a lot of those earlier reviews

I should mention that even these reviewers only had the devices for like less than a day

Are you serious? That was it? They didn't have a lot of time to test these

Oh, I thought they had them for, you know, getting on a week. They had this thing for 24 hours

I think so, yeah. Wow, dude. that is, that is mind-blowing. Uh, level remix. Why are we listening to the Verge

Lull? Yeah, you know, I don't know. I mean, they're one of the ones that got the Vision Pro

I think a bigger consensus was like the eyesight on the front with your ghost eyes

Actually doesn't work all that well because that screen is so dim and it gets covered with fingerprints

that people often can't even see your eyes. So, which might be a good thing

And also the image rendered on the front is way brarier than their, their marketing

image suggested. Like, John Gerber in his review included a picture of like the best selfie he could take

And you can barely even tell that those are eyes when it's supposedly trying to show his face

It's like it's not just a ghost. It's like a near-sighted ghost. You know, I couldn't tell if it was just hard to capture on video or if it really was that

the eyes are hard to see. But having seen it now in action, at least from the reviews we've seen so far, so far

I saw Nasi Labs on Twitter say this will probably be one of the first things

they cut and I'm like yeah I probably agree with you like it doesn't seem like

it works that well and for cost savings measure to make this thing cost less money

like that seems like a prime candidate to actually be removed and like how useful is it

like I kind of feel like if someone's talking to you it's probably more polite

just to lift the goggles up and look at them than to keep the Vision Pro

on your face and look at them with the ghost guys like it seems kind of rude

to do that actually. Like, if someone's trying to speak to you, like you're, you're going to just keep your goggles on

and look at them through those weird creepy ghost eyes Um I don know I can see what they trying to do Like if I imagine being in a conversation somebody who wearing it and if I imagine

it actually working, I can see what they're trying to do. Like, it would be pretty neat if it did work

You know, if you look over at someone and then, you know, they can look at you with your eyes as if it's a transparent thing

But I imagine it actually makes me think the opposite way, that Apple is just going to keep

trying to improve it so that they can. that make their imagination of how it should ideally work a reality

Well, you're definitely right about the improving part. I mean, they're probably going to be making all sorts of improvements as this thing starts getting released

I'm already getting bored with this. Like, we're just sitting here reading, like, what other reviewers have said

I think it might be more interesting just to talk about, like, the overall impressions like we've seen so far

So, Griffin, I know you have some stuff to say. Just take it away. I think a very apt comparison to make is

to the original Macintosh. And I mean that in the truest sense

and that if you've actually used the original Macintosh, you know, I have a Macintosh classic

sitting over my shoulder right now. I have Macintosh Plus sitting on the floor. It's a very clunky machine

It was also incredibly expensive when it debuted. It also had a limited selection of apps on launch

It also had a lot of very obvious compromises. It only had one floppy disk drive

It had no internal storage. So, you know, if you wanted to launch a program, you had to constantly switch

and back and forth between, you know, it's one and only floppy disk drive. It didn't have multitasking, but it presented a brand new paradigm for using a computer

You weren't, you know, staring at a white text on a black screen, you know, poking around

on a keyboard, you know, with no idea what you were doing, with a manual perpetually sitting

next to you because you have to, you just don't understand how to use the thing. You know, it had a visual interface that you could use to guide you if you ever didn't know what you were doing

You know, direct manipulation with a mouse pointing at the screen to see what you want to do

It's worth remembering that this is the worst Vision OS device that Apple will ever ship

VisionOS 2 will probably add way more native apps. It'll refine a lot of the buggy software experiences

FaceTime with a Vision Pro is going to get. a lot better because the digital personas will not only be made better through software

but they'll add new features to that