Apple Vision Pro is the Future of Productivity

Initial Impressions

I came down with Covid late last week (yes, I guess covid is still a thing), which gave me a lot of quality time with the new Apple Vision Pro. I think all the reviews agree that it is the best entertainment platform on the market, but I spent my time trying to figure out how I could impact my productivity and business workflows.

Desk Experience

Profoundly better work experience than previous. large macbook display is fantastic. floating vision pro windows around it is like having half a dozen monitors.

Casual/non desk Work Scenarios Are Mixed

I often move from location to location throughout the day even when working from home or the office. When away from my desk, I just use my ipad. Using just my vision pro, these scenarios are infinitely better in some ways, very poor in others. The productivity of an infinite canvas with as many windows as I want is far superior. I can be highly productive in a way that previously was reserved for hardware intensive desk environments (read: multiple monitors). I use a bluetooth keyboard and trackpad (secured together by a plastic tray I found online) to accelerate input speed to laptop/ipad+keyboard levels. I think I wouldn't be missing much forgoing the trackpad, except that my primary notetaking app is Obsidian (an electron app) and vision os doesn't recognize everywhere that could be clickable as clickable. For others (and hopefully me in the near future), I think just a keyboard will be sufficient.

Mobile Work Scenarios Aren't Useful

I had thought I could support mobile meetings with the vision pro. I had visions (no pun intended) of walking with a Zoom meeting hanging to one side and my notes to the other. Windows anchor themselves to physical spots in a surprising and amazing way (I left my email in the bathroom and had to wander around looking for where I left it), which means they do not follow you around. You can hold one window with your hand and walk with it, but this seemed more annoying than useful...akin to walking your zoom dog around the block. I suspect this will be an evolution of the OS.

Additionally, the pass through is fantastic when you are stationary and looking at things within about a foot of the camera (think, looking at your Apple Watch), but with any movement or things that are even a couple of feet away, it gets grainy (even reading the physical screen of a MacBook or iPad in a "normal" position). You probably won't trip and kill yourself, but you won't be enjoying the scenery.

Downtime Work Scenarios Are Killer

I travel a lot, so the number of evenings I am sitting in a hotel lobby catching up on work, news, and other areas of my life is a common occurrence. The Vision Pro is a transformational device in these scenarios. I sat on my patio, with email, text messages, the news app, and a couple browsers up and floating around the environment. It was fantastic. I use Spark as my mail client on iOS and Mac and it was very therapeutic to casually grab my emails out of the air and flick them out of my inbox.

The big negative was food and drink. Eating was mildly challenging. Drinking is almost impossible for many size/shapes of glasses. I eventually dropped a straw in my wine glass since there was no one there to be embarrassed in front of.

On the embarrassment front, if you are doing all this in public, you do look like a dork. Society might come to accept it, but in the Platonic sense, you will still look like a dork.

I Am Optimistic About Travel

Between covid and the weekend, I haven't traveled with the Vision Pro, but this is the work scenario that is the most compelling for me. I can already see fantastic benefits to working on a plane. The "real estate" of an infinite canvas vs the small screen on an iPad or laptop will dramatically increase productivity. If not in business/first, the constant terror of a reclining seat crushing your computer (or having your screen angled awkwardly so it fits) is a thing of the past. There are no more concerns about what you can work on or not (re: confidential data). The Vision Pro is like noise cancelling headphones for your eyes. Paired with AirPods or equivalent, the Vision Pro creates a distraction free cocoon for getting work done.

Video Calls Are a No Go

I had assumed internal calls could be done with the vision pro. The quality and creepiness of the avatar basically means I won't even facetime my family with it. My avatar looks like he has joined the call to tell my killer that he will never know a night of rest. For large meetings where the convention is no video, I think there will be significant benefit in replacing my current system of call on my macbook, notes/etc on my iPad side by side.

The Killer Limitation Is App Support

For me, I had a couple of back breaking compromises that kept me from full productivity. First, my corporate resources are secured by MSFTs MDM, Intune. Intune supports iOS and iPadOS, but not VisionOS. That meant no native email, no calendar, no file access, no Teams access (which means no access to my internal meetings and many of my external meetings). Personally, I also use OmniFocus for task management (heavily) and this is one of the many apps that unchecked the "compatibility" flag to allow their iPad app to be installed on VisionOS.

There is a learning curve

While the initial experience and basic use of the spatial computing paradigm is very straightforward and you pick it up easily, to get productive, it takes some practice. There are three key areas I found I had to put in some reps to get seamless flow.

First, text input is hard. The virtual keyboard isn't as worthless as the early reviews make it out to be, but it is first generation iPhone bad. Voice input is ok, but suffers from the lame limitations and annoyances of other Apple platforms with words not coming through quite right and autocorrect being autocorrect. What is really painful is editing text. Getting to the exact spot where an edit needs to be made is hard. Selecting text is hard. There are some tricks, but they don't seem to be written down. In particular, I found that if I could get the cursor inserted anywhere into the text, I could drag my pinched fingers through the text in a similar way to holding down the spacebar on the iPhone keyboard. That was a game changer. Clearly, I will be carrying a bluetooth keyboard around with me similar to the need on an iPad.

Second, eye tracking is great, but not good enough in a lot of compatible iPad (ie iPad/iPhone apps). A lot of times I just couldn't hit what I was aiming for. There is also a very slight (very very slight) delay in recognizing the select "pinch". I found my natural inclination was to move my eyes milliseconds before the pinch was recognized. This results in a lot of app chaos where you are doing things you didn't mean to. I am just thankful that the Spark mail app has a great undo feature (that I can hit 100% of the time with eye/pinch coordination), or I would have destroyed my inbox.

Third, and most minor, there are some nuances to the pinch motion and window placement that requires a level of awareness. I constantly found myself trying to pinch my middle finger instead of my index finger. That took a while to get over. When doing precise window placement (e.g. setting up my desk work environment), the natural movement is often to have your palm facing you instead of away from you. Eye tracking doesn't like that so you have to contort your arms to complete the move. Lastly and most unfortunate, you can't use stemware. Every time I tried to pick up my wine glass, I had a rouge pinch. ????

VisionOS is a Little Buggy

I don't think anyone is surprised that there are some bugs with the first version of the OS. What impinged my productivity in a way I wasn't expecting was that there is a slow degradation of the OS over time that I haven't identified the cause. This led to a deterioration of eye tracking accuracy and increased latency in pinch detection. I found myself getting frustrated many times with the interface and not fully realizing it. A reboot would instantly fix it and the experience post reboot vs just a couple minutes earlier was jarring. I might not have noticed or done anything about it and abandoned for the weekend if "environments" (turning off passthrough mode) hadn't have stopped working. PSA: Therapeutic reboots are a must.

Comfort

Everyone complains about the weight and comfort in their initial impressions. I notice the weight, but I had no issue wearing the headset for essentially two and a half days straight. I had no eyestrain. I had no skin irritation on my face. I did get bedhead because you HAVE to use the "dual strap". I assume the solo band is just there because in a future version, it will weight less and that is what they want it to look like long term.

While it was comfortable, the biggest ergonomic issue I encountered was the battery. Because of relatively short battery life, I had to keep it plugged in most of the time (you can't hot swap batteries). There is no magsafe so I would forget I was plugged in, go wandering off and chaos would ensue. Over the course of the weekend I knocked off glasses, ripped charging bricks out of the wall, and created a good deal of cord anxiety. The cord kind of faces backwards, but sitting at a desk, chargers are mostly forward (on top or under your desk), that pulls the cord forward and I would get it tangled in my arm or on top of my desk. It also pulled the charging cord behind my ear a lot of the time, which is distracting.

The Punch Line

I had the Apple IIgs (sorry, it was better than the original Mac), the Newton, the first Macbook, the first Macbook Air, the first iMac, and every top of the line iphone, ipad, airpod, and apple watch ever released. With the exception of the iPad (which was really a giant third generation iPhone), the Vision Pro is the best, most transformative product Apple has released.

Spatial Computing is a real thing and is ALREADY more productive than any other mode of computing available. This is a peak into the future.