Ask HN: Are you still using a Vision Pro? (undefined)
90 points by y1n0 3 hours ago
Almost two years ago there was a thread on this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40872102). I'm curious now that more time has passed what people think?
rpowers a minute ago
I use it every day, sometimes for hours. Once I embraced that fact that my family goes to bed before I do, I use it watch all of my "nerdy" shows at night. During the day it's been really great for having a large desktop that I can see throughout the house. For gaming, I use the geforce now service and a playstation controller. It's been quite fun!
dsernst an hour ago
I use it every day, approx ~95% of the days since it launched over 2 years ago. Many hours a day. Far and away my biggest use-case is connecting it to my laptop for gigantic (private) movie theater-sized screen.
Getting it comfortable was the most important step. The 6-months-old DualKnit band is really great for making it a lot more comfortable. An open face mod (eg $10 Macally on amazon) helps a lot with eye breathability, and restoring peripheral vision.
Also really great for being able to work well from anywhere.
Sad that so many people are sleeping on it, but what can you do? Check out r/VisionPro for tons of people that love theirs and use them constantly.
importRyan a few seconds ago
While great for travel coding, the faff of battery + cable would have been more elegant as one cable plugged into the laptop; it can be an embarrassing rats nest.
Xcode 27’s Device Hub now allows interacting with nearby dev devices (a bit better than Android Studio’s implementation). Super convenient change that makes it practical to do more things while in the recliner / VP.
jkubicek an hour ago
Do you wear glasses and do you have the prescription inserts for the AVP? I have a very mild prescription, no inserts, and I find text in the AVP to be distractingly blurry. Enough so that I’ve never been able to use the virtual monitor for more than a few minutes at a time.
For context, I have no problem using external monitors without my glasses. The only downside is very tired eyes at the end of a workday, but I can read text just fine.
pfannkuchen 23 minutes ago
I have the inserts, they work great. I find using the Vision Pro as a monitor less fatiguing than using a regular monitor with glasses. I think it’s because the Vision Pro Display is optically several feet away due to lens trickery, and focusing on further away things is better for eye fatigue.
nwatson 22 minutes ago
When I bought one they had "reader" lenses that were not prescription, they did well enough. I use 2.0 diopter reading glasses otherwise from Costco.
dsernst an hour ago
No glasses or prescription, sorry.
Have you tried w/ contact lenses? I've seen that work well for friends when they try them out.
importRyan 9 minutes ago
chocochunks an hour ago
Have you used XR glasses (e.g., from Rokid or Viture)? If so, how do they compare for that use case?
dsernst an hour ago
I tried on the Xreal for 3 minutes when I met someone with them at a party. They were cool but noticeably a lot less bright.
Similarly I tried the original HoloLens, many many years ago (2016?), with the similar waveguide technology. It was outside, at night, so relatively easy to see, albeit with jarringly tight field of view.
Without a doubt I'm excited about lightweight AR glasses that I can wear in public. My non-expert opinion is we're still a few years away.
In the meantime, I love my Apple goggles. For home usage only, and not when guests come over. Going open face (no lightshield) makes them feel a lot more like magic AR glasses, with the ~95% accurate passthrough.
sofixa 17 minutes ago
BoorishBears 24 minutes ago
Me1000 21 minutes ago
Stopped using it after about a week or two of usage. The only interesting use case was screen mirroring from my Mac, but that wasn't compelling enough to endure the weight of it on my face. I expected watching a movie would be a good use case, but in reality the brightness of the screen would reflect (I guess?) off my face and create a glare... so it ultimately wasn't a good movie device. Gave it to a friend who was excited about it, and he also stopped using it after about a week or two.
CraigJPerry an hour ago
I bought the refreshed M5 version with the new headstrap. I read so many complaints about weight and it was just never an issue for me personally. Maybe the new strap is that much better?
That said, the battery cable was super annoying, id accidentally catch it multiple times per day. The battery is good for less than 2 hours so i used it plugged into the wall.
For zoom calls, the persona thing is hilariously bad, unusable in a business context. Interesting for a few minutes as a tech demo though.
The virtual layout is good - a big citrix app screen (its the ipad app) for remote desktop, zoom, safari etc off to the sides and then things like calendar widget pinned to physical wall. But text clarity / quality is just slightly not good enough for software development. Almost, its close. If you dont mind large fonts its good enough.
Ultimately returned it but it was a close run thing, i almost kept it.
I do still hanker for something like this, tempted to try xreal or other glasses but seems like the PPD is even lower.
goldenarm 44 minutes ago
What makes zoom bad ? Lag ?
asadotzler 27 minutes ago
It's literally half-Retina visual fidelity. I couldn't stand reading text on it for more than a few minutes.
sgt 22 minutes ago
Once they make such a headset with full retina I'm in
curiouscavalier 2 hours ago
having developed multiple apps on it and tried every which way to use it (as an XR enthusiast in general), I have never been so happy to put a headset up on the shelf and never pull it out again.
using as a spatial monitor was cool. for about 10min until my neck got tired of the added weight. but I’ll give credit that those 10min were pretty cool.
cineticdaffodil an hour ago
In industrial robotics, there is this emergency practice when the payload and tooling on the robot gets to heavy, to connect the payload to a counterweight and pully system, to "neutralize it in weight". Has anyone here tried that ? It should take three thin ropes with weight to make a object neutrally buyont. Yes, its tied to one room, yes its not pretty and futuristic, but its practical? If you want freedom of movement, connect via magnet- and dedock on leaving the room?
MisterTea 16 minutes ago
Counterweights are common in a lot of industrial machinery. Most CNC mills have them on the Z axis to neutralize the spindle weight. And they're not always a weight on a rope or chain, they can be gas or hydraulic cylinders with valves enabling dynamic loading.
thih9 an hour ago
Here is a video:
https://old.reddit.com/r/VisionPro/comments/1cki7jc/brillian...
nkrisc 2 hours ago
Unless materials science advances to the point where a display like the Vision Pro weighs as much as a pair of glasses, I don’t think there’ll ever be mass adoption of wearable VR beyond anything more than a novelty, for exactly the reason you stated.
Wearing something heavy on the front of your face is simply not a pleasant experience.
Geee an hour ago
Beyond 2 is 107 grams. The new M5 Vision Pro is 750 grams. It's easily doable, but Apple deliberately makes them heavy for some reason.
layer8 9 minutes ago
asadotzler 10 minutes ago
wvenable 2 hours ago
Since it's tethered anyway for the battery, I think Apple made a mistake just not building it as a (smart) monitor tethered to a separate PC.
Imagine if the vision pro could just be plugged into a small compute module with a battery or just plugged directly into a Macbook. It would be lighter, cheaper, and more flexible. I think a lot more people would have been interested in it.
Cassell 2 hours ago
Yes, make the battery 2x bigger and include the compute in that.
It would be so cool to be able to plug in arbitrary input devices too, like a dvd player, but its understandable that others don’t feel this way, and it would totally not be an apple product if it did this.
One of their main imposed constraints was clearly to make the battery pocketable, which sadly precludes a lot of things which would have made it a better product, in favour of wider acceptability.
grokx an hour ago
asadotzler 30 minutes ago
A tethered virtual monitor wouldn't be a PC, it'd be a PC peripheral. Cook wanted a PC platform and app store he could call his own, so we got this 1.5 pound strap-on facial PC instead of a really nice virtual display.
Also, it doesn't make the best virtual monitor anyway, as the display fidelity is about half-Retina, so all the pixels really stick out compared to every other display Apple's shipped in recent memory. A 1998 Powerbook has crisper text.
orimirs 2 hours ago
Is there a headset you like use for prolonged periods?
ChoGGi 2 hours ago
I don't have any issue going a couple hours with my HP reverb g2, it is wired though, and I imagine quite a bit lighter.
system2 2 hours ago
If you are not going to pick it up from the shelf, why wouldn't you sell it before it loses even more value as tech evolves?
dehugger 2 hours ago
most gen1 apple products are a small retirement investment if you keep it in working condition for long enough
tracyhenry 2 hours ago
Not regularly, but I do watch movies on it once in a while (in those beautiful environments), especially when I'm on a flight.
WWDC also just rolled out some quite exciting features to RealityKit: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/279/ as well as visionOS itself (https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/287/)
It makes me wonder if Apple is really giving it up as news have claimed.
jeromegv 2 hours ago
> It makes me wonder if Apple is really giving it up as news have claimed.
I don't think anyone serious has claimed that.
alt227 an hour ago
asadotzler 18 minutes ago
Vision Pro's top talent all moved with their boss, Mike Rockwell, to Siri where they have at least a prayer of promotions, not to mention the satisfaction of working on a product that's not a miserable failure in the market.
Apple shelved the follow up v2 over a year ago and signaled very clearly it was refocusing its XR efforts toward AR glasses.
There hasn't been a new Vision Pro component order since the late 2023, early 2024 original orders that were capped (by SSS's display capacity) at 500k units worth, so Apple hasn't sold even that tiny amount yet.
It was Tim Cook's baby, his last shot at a product legacy, and the guy that just inherited Cooks role put even the lesser Vision Air on ice, the last goggles product that was still on Apple's roadmap.
So, it's not dead, but it's clearly on life support with no goggles of any kind remaining on the roadmap and Apple's attention fully moved to glasses and AI.
cglee an hour ago
Yes, it feels like the future every time I put it on. For work, the ultra wide has been wonderful when I'm not at my desk. I also get to have the NBA playoffs to the side on a 10ft screen while I work. For videos, it's a complete game changing experience. They're slowly but surely releasing more "immersive" features. Eg, I recently watched an immersive Lakers game and immediately thought I'd pay to watch games like this. It reminded me when HD became default and we finally realized what we were missing. I don't want to watch games where I'm not courtside anymore.
The two things that consistently delight me are AI and my AVP. I'm trying to combine the two.
hbn 25 minutes ago
I'd love to buy one cause I love the idea of watching movies in that and I watch stuff alone all the time.
I just can't justify the $5000CAD starting price to watch movies. I've considered getting a used M2 model, but I believe you still need to get fitted for the eye piece to ensure a proper seal, and the closest Apple Store to me is about a 6 hour drive. Also I'm not even sure all the cool new Siri stuff yesterday would be supported on the M2 model, so it'd kinda suck to spend all that money and be locked out of new features right away.
iFred 28 minutes ago
Yes, nearly every working day.
The ability to focus on something while the world around me melts away. When it is just myself, the virtual display of my Mac, and the drifting grains of gypsum at White Sands, I seem to be at peace with whatever I am working on.
simonjgreen 3 hours ago
Asked recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48275508
dmitshur 2 hours ago
I'm using it ocassionally - whenever I have time to do further WebXR development beyond what I've already done, and when an interesting new immersive video or 3D movie becomes available on it. I'll sometimes use it to relax and catch up on any new VR180 videos on youtube.
For other work or entertainment that doesn't take advantage of its spatial features, I tend to revert to using a computer with an external display. The display in the Vision Pro cannot quite match the resolution and HDR headroom of the external display I ended up having (a Pro Display XDR). Maybe if it didn't get outclassed by my external display when displaying 2D content, I'd have additional motivation to use it more often.
racl101 16 minutes ago
My buddy hasn't used it to do any work in a while. Only uses it every now and then to watch movies.
aspenmartin an hour ago
Almost every day. Meanwhile my quest pro gathers a lot of dust. The AVP as a screen is just so much more comfortable and productive for me and nothing beats it for entertainment. It also just still feels like a really great user experience and I was genuinely sad to see the project sunsetted.
dsernst an hour ago
The sunsetting rumors are almost certainly untrue. See https://daringfireball.net/2026/04/on_the_future_of_apples_v... for example.
Just yesterday they announced a new OS with a number of interesting new features, like custom environments, improved click-with-your-eyes-controls (Dwell Control), a bunch more: https://www.apple.com/os/visionos/
aspenmartin 44 minutes ago
That’s very exciting! Thank you for the reference!
mkw5053 41 minutes ago
I use it about once every 3 months now to watch content while laying in bed when I don't think it'll annoy my wife too much
nathanyz 3 hours ago
No, haven't found a killer use case for it as of now. Was only a really good personal movie theater.
mzagaja 2 hours ago
Primarily as an external monitor and when good 3D or immersive videos are released.
t1234s 12 minutes ago
Are they worth it if you fly frequently?
djsavvy 2 hours ago
It's quite fun and I'll drop into it from time to time, but it's mostly a novel plaything for me. I do have a friend who has used it for full-time work for years though.
elicash an hour ago
My wife is the primary user and frequently uses it when she works. She also travels with it and doesn’t mind occasional weird looks.
I use it occasionally, either to watch movies or the content that Apple releases specifically for it.
breakds 14 minutes ago
Almost every day, watching videos, having meetings, hands on (the agent) coding and playing games.
nickandbro 3 hours ago
Waiting for Steam Frame.
simjnd 2 hours ago
Sadly the passthrough is black and white only. That's the one thing I love about the Vision Pro is it never feels claustrophobic thanks to very good passthrough quality.
bananamogul an hour ago
Wow, Steam Frame has only B&W passthrough...[1]
The Quest 3S has color passthrough and it's hardly an Apple-level device, and it's $349 in comparison.
I guess as a gamer, I don't care that much. I put on my headset to game, and if I need to step away for a moment, I'm more likely to take it off than to wander around my house with a headset on. Still, I thought color passthrough was now table stakes for a headset.
[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/vr-hardware/the-steam-frame...
simjnd 24 minutes ago
daviding 2 hours ago
Will be interesting to see which side of $999 it drops. I'll buy it regardless but the optics (heh) on the high RAM cost issue and the unit price might temper demand a bit.
some_random 2 hours ago
Does the AVP actually compete with it? I thought it didn't do games?
daviding 2 hours ago
It does local stuff of course, and some are trying to bring PC streaming to it, e.g. https://github.com/Kross82/KRVR-releases
NetOpWibby 3 hours ago
Ooh share results here when you get it!
bijowo1676 3 hours ago
unless Apple allows adult content applications on Vision Pro its future is doomed.
There are only two first-adopters for any new technology: military and adult industry.
Without these you wont get any traction
wolvoleo 19 minutes ago
This is true. I use my quest 3 for adult content all the time and it honestly adds a lot. It's the one thing where immersion really adds value. It's like you're there yourself, especially if you have a toy that can synchronise to the content.
The prudishness is really holding back the industry.
kenferry 2 hours ago
I don’t think either of those drove smart phone adoption.
numpad0 a few seconds ago
[delayed]
joemi 2 hours ago
Adult websites were never banned on those, as far as I recall.
nkrisc 2 hours ago
You can watch porn on devices most people already have.
yieldcrv 25 minutes ago
doesn't work well on an airplane
kaikai 2 hours ago
Don’t forget advertising
NetOpWibby 3 hours ago
Web browsers exist
Rohansi 2 hours ago
You mean web browser, singular.
bijowo1676 3 hours ago
then why buy expensive vision pro if I have a browser on my phone?
wat10000 3 hours ago
iPhone has never allowed those and it seems to have done alright.
bijowo1676 3 hours ago
it did add Safari private browsing mode :), but overall iPhone piggybacked off of the Internet, which was created by Military and adult industry were the first large scale content websites that drove innovation
jzellis 3 hours ago
Yes, absolutely no one uses an iPhone to go to Pornhub and spank themselves into oblivion because Steve and Tim said it's wrong
wat10000 2 hours ago
some_random 2 hours ago
I don't think that's true, 3.5k for a porn machine is an incredibly steep price.
ako 2 hours ago
People "happily" spend that on drugs, tobacco, and alcohol, so why not on porn.
some_random 2 hours ago
wholinator2 2 hours ago
I don't believe the two thoughts are mutually exclusive.
BryantD an hour ago
Yeah -- mostly for media, though. Occasionally with my laptop while traveling for work, for the sake of the huge screen.
antimatter15 3 hours ago
No
brian_herman 38 minutes ago
No I barely use it
zorobo 2 hours ago
Still using the AVP but not exclusively, about 3 hours a day, with a hardware Bluetooth keyboard.
Mostly multiple safari windows opening on servers via webterm, cli and emacs.
It’s especially great when traveling.
Only problem, I cannot share a window when presenting…
some_random 2 hours ago
Does the AVP still not integrate with VR games/simulators? I understand why Apple wants it to be a productivity tool not a gaming device, but it really sucks to restrict it in that way.
fsiefken 2 hours ago
nightsd01 an hour ago
Got mine on launch day. It's been sitting in the case for over a year. It's frankly just not comfortable to use for more than 10 minutes.
outside1234 3 hours ago
The only feature that looked compelling to me was the ability to have "multi-monitor" on a plane.
Did anyone ever use that and did it live up to the hype? Or did you just get sick from having a headset on?
everforward 2 hours ago
I tried a bit on the original Vive and text was awful. I didn’t get nauseated, but games didn’t make me sick either (I did get some “sea legs” when I took it off).
Haven’t tried on the AVP, I think it has way better displays than the OG Vive did.
stephc_int13 3 hours ago
They probably have some kind of fallback system, but the visual-inertial odometry they are using for spatial positioning that is working pretty well when stationary (at home) tend to break badly on a train or plane.
wahnfrieden 3 hours ago
there is a travel mode
sublinear 3 hours ago
A buddy let me try his Vision Pro, but I instead bought USB C display glasses. I just use them as a second display, not the AR experience you're probably thinking of.
I don't specify which brand or model because I have gone through several pairs since then. They're all about the same and somewhat flimsy, but worth it for the reduced bulk.
j-wags an hour ago
I also got usb-c display glasses and they've been great as an external monitor while traveling. I strongly recommend them to folks who want to be able to work comfortably on airplanes or other situations where you don't have an ergonomic desk.
cadamsdotcom an hour ago
jotux 3 hours ago
>but I instead bought USB C display glasses
How did you use these? Did you like them?
wolvoleo 17 minutes ago
sublinear an hour ago
wahnfrieden 3 hours ago
I'm an indie that travels a lot. I'm interested in it to have more flexibility with ergonomic setups for development, such as being able to stand without needing a way to elevate my laptop to eye height (it's easy at least to find ways to get my keyboard halves to proper height for standing) or lying with keyboard halves at my sides.
Curious if anyone is using it successfully for ergonomics (not just for the convenience of having a big monitor which is secondary for me - Macbook + iPad sidecar display is very travel-friendly but very difficult to use ergonomically away from home).
volkl48 2 hours ago
I can't see any realistic way that the ergonomics would be better than your haphazard hotel room setup. Reality is that the device still has weight on your head and neck and is still kind of tiring to wear for long periods of time.
It's still 1.5lbs hanging off the front of your face and over hours that's still straining.
Lying down or in a recliner or something where you're not really having to support the device yourself is about the only way that I feel you might achieve any kind of better result in an ergonomics sense for a significant length of use time.
(Disclaimer: I had one to demo for a few months and used it/experimented with it sporadically, I don't own one.)
hmokiguess an hour ago
Yes, except, wait, I don't have one. Nvm.
jordemort 2 hours ago
I forgot those existed