“Base reality blows.”

“Base reality blows.” … that is scratched into the bathroom mirror at one of my favorite coffee shops in Chicago. It’s also what I said after my very first test session on the Apple Vision Pro. A friend got one and was kind enough to let a few of us demo it yesterday. I was mostly joking, but my first experience on the thing was certainly enough to make me ponder that message on the bathroom mirror.

Here are the first impressions from my two friends and me:

The Engineer: “My very first impression was that it feels like a proof of concept, not a “real” product yet. All the polish you’d expect from Apple hardware is there, that’s what makes Apple … Apple. Learning the eye-tracking and hand gestures was initially challenging and buggy. But that was before we realized how important it is to redo the Eye- and Hand-Detection set-up every time you switch users. After that, it’s much smoother. I can see why this will be really nice for programmers. It feels a clear step ahead of the Meta Quest. The most impressive experiences are the few pre-loaded demos from Apple and their launch partners: taking apart a life-sized F1 car; standing in Alicia Keys’s studio while records a song; standing on a slack line 2,000 feet above a mountain lake in New Zealand; practicing open heart surgery; looking down on a table-top PGA Tour golf-course while the leaders play around the course simultaneously. Right now, there’s not a ton to do with it, other than those demos and watching videos. But they are enough to make you a believer in what the future holds.”

The Visionary: “There are little moments that are just mind-blowing, like when I realized I could physically walk over to a screen in the room and tap on it. Right now (in base reality) we’re in a small room, and virtual reality I have YouTube on one wall, iPhoto on the opposite wall, and Apple TV+ on a third wall. Looking around at my different screens is effortless and natural. The gestures and commands for interacting with them aren’t 100% nailed yet, but you get used to them in a couple of hours. There are almost no third-party apps, but it will be interesting to see what developers do with it eventually. It feels like there’s more opportunity for voice commands. The number of units sold is still so small (200K so far), but still it feels like there are a bunch of businesses you could build on this thing as more people buy it.”

The Optimist (Me): I had read and listened to a ton of reviews and discussion of the device, so I was probably as primed as anyone could be on what to expect–both the good and the bad. Still, the experience of using it exceeded my expectations. There’s not just one mind-blowing moment, but a quick succession of them as you get used to the different things you can do. The one letdown was viewing Spatial Video that I’d captured myself. We just happened to be on our honeymoon when the iOS update supporting Spatial Video dropped, so I started capturing some in the Torres del Paine National Park in Chile. The timing was lucky–if I’d gotten the update three days later, I would never have had such an epic laboratory to experiment in. Still, I had no idea when I’d get to use a Vision Pro, so it was awesome that I got to try one so soon. But I found the Spatial Video to be not necessarily better than any other iPhone video. And Pano photos were surprisingly as good, if not better.

Quibbles aside, my expectations were shattered. I am truly impressed. My biggest take away is that, if I had one of these, it would likely be enough to get me to switch from Windows back to Mac for my main PC. I left Mac after college, and never looked back. So this is a big change. The productivity potential, especially when traveling or working anywhere other than my main workspace, feels immense. But with a price tag around $4,000 with tax, I won’t be buying one any time soon.

So, while base reality is not yet obsolete, my prediction for how much time I’ll spend here just went down. And my understanding of it may change too. Driving home after playing with the Vision Pro for a few hours, the world looked somehow both more and less real.