Picking up a Vision Pro? You’ll find that the battery life is slightly better than you might have expected — but you won’t be able to swap the pack out on the fly.
As pointed out at DaringFireball, you can’t hot-swap Apple Vision Pro batteries and need to entirely shut the headset down first. The Apple Vision Pro has no built-in battery, which means accidentally unplugging it from the battery will shut the headset off. Thankfully, it looks like that won’t be a massive issue — the battery connector is designed in such a way as to make it harder to accidentally unplug the cable.
If you are worried about the claimed battery life, there’s some news that will put your mind at ease. The battery pack seems to be performing better than expected so far, with our friends at Tom’s Guide reporting multiple hours of on-and-off use and CNBC watching both Barbie and two episodes of Masters of Air on a single charge.
Lost potential — iMore’s take
Though the choice to not go with an internal battery means that Apple Vision Pros will last longer as you can replace the battery pack when it stops being as effective, it loses out with its lack of at least some kind of internal power. This is also likely done to reduce the weight of an already very big headset. The battery is reported to weigh just over 300g, which makes it almost double the iPhone 15 Pro and 100g more than the iPhone 15 Pro Max. With just enough juice to keep the machine alive for a few moments, you could hot-swap batteries and get another full charge worth of use.
Hot swapping batteries would allow you to keep a cycle of charged batteries on hand, essentially allowing for completely wireless headset use. When one battery dies, plug in the charged one and get the empty one charging. In the grand scheme of things, many Apple Vision Pro users will just get used to this design decision and it means not having to pay for extra external batteries but, it’s hard not to lament a slightly less tethered future.
