TheStreet's Jacob Krol spent two weeks with Apple's (AAPL) Vision Pro headset strapped to his face. We asked him to walk us through some of its coolest capabilities to see if it's worth the hype and the price tag.
Related: Yes, you can try a Vision Pro at an Apple Store — here’s how
Jacob Krol: Hey there! I'm Jake Krol with TheStreet and just spent two weeks testing every facet of the Apple Vision Pro. Now we're going to walk through some of my favorite things to do on the device.
You'll notice I'm using the double tap gesture. It is the pinch between your index finger and your thumb and the cursor, akin to a Mac or your finger on an iPhone or iPad, is your eyes. So you'll see me looking all over the place.
We're going to start by opening a few different apps. So what's really cool about this is I can layer stuff in my space. So I just opened up Safari and I will visit my favorite news site, TheStreet.com, obviously, to check out some cool stuff. So I have that open over here. I can resize that to my heart's content. Make it 100 inches, 50 inches however big I want and I'm going to open up photos to relive some memories. Maybe some trips down the shore.
I can zoom in, make those fully immersive if I want, and then I'm going to overlay Keynote to practice one of my slide decks that I need to present to the team at some point in the future. Another really cool thing about the Apple Vision Pro is entertainment. It's your personal home entertainment. For the $3,500 starting price, you get an infinitely large screen spatial audio with support for Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos.
Let's go ahead and open up Disney plus, which did something cool here. There's these things called environments on Apple Vision Pro, Disney Plus made their own environments. You can see Disney Plus theater, Avengers,Tower Scare floor, or Tatooine - big Star Wars fan. So one of the coolest things about Apple Vision Pro is using it to work. I've spent several workdays with this thing strapped to my face, thoroughly enjoying the thrill of having a giant Mac display with a bunch of other apps running.
So I have a 14-inch MacBook Pro here. I'm going to approach it, try to get the Vision Pro to figure out it's there. You'll see connect, do the double tap gesture, give it a second here and I have my Mac display. I can instantly resize it if I want, see if we can get that to work. So right there it can be a little difficult to use the onscreen keyboard when you're writing, say a 6,000 word review about the Apple Vision Pro. So what's really nice is you can connect a Bluetooth keyboard to it and a Bluetooth mouse. It makes it a lot easier to work and you can use those peripherals across your other apps.
So I'm over here, I can jump over here. I'm on Zoom with my friends Ross and Sean and I can use this mouse, as you can see. And it appears on the screen, that's something called universal control, which first premiered with the iPad and the Mac. So it's not just you're stuck in the Mac right now. I'm running my Mac at 150 some odd inches.
I have the Zoom app for Apple Vision Pro running right there. And over here I can open up Slack, the iPad version, and it's running perfectly right there. Pretty freaking cool if you ask me that. We're running multiple OS at once on a device with a Mac chip inside that's also an iPad chip. So pretty freaking cool.
Those are a few of my favorite things about the Apple Vision Pro, and you can head over to TheStreet.com to read my full review. At $3,500, it's very expensive and may be cost prohibitive to some, but it's clear that this is the future. It feels like the future today when you can layer an app in your space and just go about your day pass through is really, really cool and sharper and better than the Meta Quest 3. You also get an ultra premium design that does fit with the price tag when you consider what you're getting a better than 4K view for each of your eyes. So it's the ultimate immersive entertainment device.
It's clear Apple has something unique and special here. It might not get full mass adoption until a couple generations when that price gets lower. But in the meantime, do yourself a favor: book that demo at your local Apple Store to spend 30 minutes for free and be amazed by the hand and eye tracking.
