The Apple Vision Pro Is Spectacular and Sad
Updated at 8:41 p.m. ET on February 3, 2024
“I am crying,” my editor said when I connected with her via FaceTime on my Apple Vision Pro. “You look like a computer man.”
What made her choke with laughter was my “persona,” the digital avatar that the device had generated when I had pointed its curved, glass front at my face during setup. I couldn’t see the me that she saw, but apparently it was uncanny. You look handsome and refined, she told me, but also fake.
I’d picked up my new face computer hours earlier at the local mall, full of hope for what it would represent. The headset, which weighs as much as a cauliflower and sells for $3,499 and up, is now—after eight months of hype —finally available. The Apple Vision Pro offers two innovations in one: a virtual-reality (VR) headset with a higher resolution than most others on the market, and an array of augmented-reality (AR) cameras that allow a wearer to see ordinary computer applications floating in space, and to interact with them via hand gestures. To make the AR work, a knob on the top of the device can dial back your level of
