Apple Vision Pro release date, price, specs, apps and more
CUPERTINO, Calif.—After years of speculation, leaks, rumors, setbacks, and rumblings of amazing behind-the-scenes demos, Apple has made its plans for a mixed reality platform and headset public. Vision Pro is "the first Apple Product you look through, not at," Apple's Tim Cook said, a "new AR platform with a new product" that augments reality by seamlessly blending the real world with the digital world.
The headset will start at $3,499 and be available early next year. That puts the device in an entirely different class than most existing VR headsets, including the $550 PSVR2 (which requires a tethered PS5 to use) and the $500 Quest 3 that was just announced for a fall release.
"I believe augmented reality is a profound technology. Blending digital content with the real world can unlock new experiences," Cook said.
The headset, which looks like a pair of shiny ski goggles, has a lightweight aluminum frame with a single piece of glass on the front that acts as a lens for a wide array of cameras. A single button lets you capture videos, while a "digital crown" lets you tune how much of outside reality is filtered out at any time.
The Vision Pro's MicroOLED backplane packs 23 million pixels across two panels "the size of a postage stamp." A three-element lens delivers that image at the proper depth "everywhere you look," Apple said, and allows for true 4K HDR video that can show fine text that looks sharp "from any angle."
The headset is powered by an M2 chip combined with support from a new chip called R1. These chips process inputs from 12 different cameras, five sensors (included a LiDAR scanner), and six different microphones. Apple said that while the M2 "ensures performance," the R1 "virtually eliminates lag" and delivers images to the displays within 12ms, ensuring experiences "feel like they're taking place in front of your eyes."
For weight purposes, an external battery will sit in your pocket and connect to the Vision Pro through a cable that attaches to the headstrap near the temple. Apple's product web site says that battery can support "up to 2 hours of use," or all-day use while plugged in to a wall outlet.
A number of "soft textile parts" are part of a modular system that flexes to the form of your face, with a flexible band that incorporates ear pods for sound. Custom inserts from Zeiss will allow for vision correction for those who wear glasses.
The headset's visionOS operating system can be controlled in a "fully 3D interface" without a handheld controller. It solely uses your eyes, hands, and voice as an interface, and the unit lets you "control the system simply by looking." Icons and other UI elements react to your gaze, and you use natural gestures like tapping your fingers or a gentle flick to select them—no need to hold your hands awkwardly in front of you constantly.
Existing iOS developer frameworks have been extended into the visionOS environment to offer support for what Apple is calling "spatial computing." That means "hundreds of thousands" of existing iPad and iOS apps will work on Vision Pro at launch. Apple promises that developers will be able to create 3D objects that "look and feel real" in their visionOS apps. A new app store will include custom Vision Pro apps as well as compatible iOS apps.
A user's encrypted, on-device "Optic ID" is used to unlock the Vision Pro and power things like Apple Pay and password autofill. Camera data and information about your eye input is kept in a separate background process, ensuring that apps and websites can't know where you're looking.
In video demonstrations, Apple showed users walking around and grabbing things from a fridge without taking the headset off. And to further keep you from feeling isolated while wearing the headset, a system called EyeSight will display your eyes when someone is nearby, conveying "a critical indicator of connection and emotion."
Floating 2D apps can be placed to float around your "real world" space, which remains visible through the semi-transparent display. Elements in this interface will cast shadows in the real room around them and respond to light, Apple said. These apps can also "expand fully into your space," like a pulsating 3D animation in a mindfulness app.
A floating 4K Mac display will appear when users glance at their MacBook display while in the Vision Pro. From there, users can interact with a virtual keyboard or their voice to type or make use of a physical Magic Trackpad and/or Magic Keyboard.
While watching movies (including 3D movies) on a virtual floating screen, the device will automatically dim your surroundings to be less distracting. The headset can take spatial photos or videos via "Apple's first three-dimensional camera" with the click of a button. You can then re-experience those 3D panoramas in a way that creates "the sensation they are standing right where it was taken."
Disney CEO Bob Iger came out to demonstrate a number of customized Vision Pro experiences, from Disney+ support to ESPN sports broadcasts with a wide array of stats filling your room to a virtual Mickey Mouse that walks around your space.
Disney+ support will be available on day one, alongside over 100 Apple Arcade titles that will be available to play via a floating screen and a handheld controller on the device.
When Apple unveiled its ambitious and very pricey new mixed reality headset earlier this week, executives ticked through a long list of impressive specs, teased big name partnerships and showed off a perfectly produced promo video.
But there was one thing Apple’s execs did not do during the keynote presentation: wear the device. Even reporters who got early access to try on the device were asked by the company not to take pictures of the experience.
The omission has not gone unnoticed. Some industry watchers have suggested that Apple CEO Tim Cook and others may have made a conscious choice to avoid seeing silly pictures of themselves with headsets turned into memes online. But behind this speculation is a more serious potential problem: even Apple may struggle to make VR headsets look cool.
Over the past decade, headsets have developed a reputation for being bulky and strange looking. Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus (later acquired by Facebook), was widely mocked and memed in 2015 after being shown on a Time Magazine cover wearing a black headset with his legs bent, arms raised and head tilted up. He looked as though he would fly away at any moment.
It’s not just headsets. Silicon Valley has struggled with the optics of other gadgets people wear on their face, too. An image of tech evangelist Robert Scoble wearing Google Glass in the shower had such a profound impact on the discourse around the product that then-Google CEO Larry Page once joked to him: “Robert, I really didn’t appreciate the shower photo.”
For Apple, the stakes are high to avoid similarly embarrassing visuals. The new headset, which blends both virtual reality and augmented reality, is Apple’s most ambitious – and riskiest – new hardware product in years. And there are already a long list of challenges the company must overcome, including a high price tag ($3,500) and an unproven market littered with rivals who have so far failed to achieve mainstream success.
In keeping with its usual playbook, Apple is leaning on its design, hardware and marketing chops to convince people to spend thousands on the device. As many viewers were quick to point out during Monday’s event, the headset looks like a pair of designer ski goggles. In one early marketing image, a woman is shown wearing the headset while dressed in very chic clothing and lounging in an upscale living room.
But not everyone is convinced.
“They’re certainly not sleek. They are trying to be sleek, but it’s a big pair of goggles on your face,” Lisa Peyton, an extended reality and experiential marketing professor at the University of Oregon, told CNN. “I would not wear that thing around outside — nobody will. Nobody will be wearing it around outside, and they know that.”
The tech giant is known for its powerful marketing, including iconic campaigns that popularized its original Macs, iPods and the iPhone. Apple’s silhouette ads in the early 2000s somehow managed to make not just iPods look cool, but also wired headphones. But Apple may still be fighting an uphill battle with its headset.
“It’s not that Apple takes the uncool and makes it cool. Apple typically takes the average and makes it cool, takes the mundane and make it cool,” Marcus Collins, marketing professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and a former Apple employee, told CNN.
But the headset, like VR itself, is certainly not mundane or “conventional,” according to Collins, in the way a phone was before the iPhone. For most people, it’s likely still an abstract concept, and possibly a very odd one. Some may associate it with images of legless avatars and goofy visuals like Luckey on the cover of Time.
Perhaps with that in mind, Apple appears to be taking steps to distance itself from other VR products.
Apple executives omitted the phrase “virtual reality” entirely from the keynote event and instead focused on terms like “spatial computing” and “augmented reality.” At the same time, the company is marketing its headset as a high end, exclusive product and perhaps hoping for it to become a status symbol.
Apple also made a unique design choice: the Vision Pro will display the user’s eyes on the outside of the headset. This way, “you’re never isolated from the people around you, you can see them and they can see you,” Alan Dye, vice president of human interface, said during the keynote. The feature could help the headset look like more of a fashion accessory than a sci-fi gadget.
For now, however, the audience for the device will likely remain limited to early adopters, developers and business customers who are able and willing to spend $3,499 on a first-generation gadget.
“This isn’t going to be everyone lining up at the Apple store to buy the new iPhone when it first came out. it’s not going to be that,” said Collins. Instead, he described Apple’s current approach as choosing to “dip your toe in the pool before making a big splash.”
With its loyal following and impressive track record on hardware, Apple may eventually be able to convince average consumers to buy future versions of the headset. But first, the device will need to get cheaper, and a little sexier.
“They know that the technology is going to get more compact, sleeker, and eventually they will be able to make a super sexy pair of glasses. I have no doubt,” Peyton said. “It’s going to be maybe two or three years away, maybe more than that, but they’ll get there.”
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