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There’s a passage in Elif Batuman’s “Summer in Samarkand Part II,” published in N+1 in 2010, that I’ve never forgotten. Batuman noted that the language of Old Uzbek had 100 different words for crying. Old Uzbek had words for “wanting to cry and not being able to; for being caused to sob by something; loudly crying like thunder in the clouds; crying in gasps; weeping inwardly or secretly; crying ceaselessly in a high voice; crying in hiccups; and for crying while uttering the sound hay hay,” Batuman wrote.
Thus went my attempt to recreate a hundred forms of crying in the Apple Vision Pro.
Look: I like a good cry. I’ve cried inwardly, I’ve hiccupped, I’ve hay-hayed. Funerals and weddings are two sides of the same crying coin for me. New babies? Kryptonite. Certain social media posts will set me off, these days more so than others. I’m suspicious of people I’ve known intimately for years who I’ve never seen cry.
Sad movies? I’m a sitting duck. On the same January day I sat through another (choreographed) demo of the Apple Vision Pro in Cupertino, I went to the famed Castro Theater to see All of Us Strangers. There we sat in cushioned seats, my friend and I, surrounded by grown men quietly weeping over Andrew Scott’s metaphysical journey. Of course, I cried too. Everything was wet. As another Irish actor, Cillian Murphy—the internet’s boyfriend—said recently to the LA Times, “The greatest democratic collective art form is sitting in a darkened space with strangers.”
Because my brain is broken, it went straight back to the Apple Vision Pro and Apple’s pandering to our emotions. Could watching sad movies in the Apple Vision Pro ever live up to this collective art form? Could it be even more powerful to watch a movie in the singular environment of a headset than in a space with other people? Doubtful. Apple, the corporate entity, might have suspected I was dubious about the product. Company reps did not respond when I asked for a review unit.
Alas! I would not be a crybaby over this development. The first week of February, I took the plunge and used a credit card to purchase the Apple Vision Pro. It cost $3,804 with tax included. Somewhere, a FICO worker wept.
I shared my plans with my coworkers, telling them how I hoped to measure the strength of Vision Pro’s emotional punch by watching weepy movies. “Past Lives Pro?” my editor quipped. “Terms and Conditions of Endearment? Cinema Pro Paradiso?” Another editor shrugged and said “Steel Magnolias?” when I asked for her sad movie pick. This was exactly the kind of masochistic movie-watching I envisioned. But first, the titan of tearjerkers: I canceled my Friday night plans, washed my face, and settled in for Life is Beautiful in Apple Vision Pro.
Screen Test
Wearing the Apple Vision Pro—casting a movie into the space in front of you, toggling on Cinema Mode using your eyeball and a quick finger flick—is a wholly subjective experience. I could spend three paragraphs describing my Apple Vision Pro field of view to you, and it would be a waste of words.
This is the challenge of marketing this kind of product, even for Apple. The Apple Vision Pro is the opposite of a shared experience. You are alone on your couch wearing a computer on your face. A cable sprouts from the side of your head. The battery pack has to be tethered at all times. The pass-through video on the Apple Vision Pro is remarkably good, which means that you can still see some of the world around you. But your vision is cut off just below your nose. It is easier to drink a glass of water in a drought than it is while wearing Apple Vision Pro. If you enjoy eating dinner while watching TV, I’ve got sad news for you.
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From the inside, though, the view is incredible. It really is. I’m just as surprised by this as you are. The picture is crisp, and the spatial sound is so realistic that more than once I removed the headset to see if someone was at the door. While watching Life is Beautiful, Roberto Benigni marched across the space where my living room meets the dining room, right up until (spoiler) Nazis took him out back and shot him. I cried.
Tears welled up in my goggles, pooling at the soft rim of the face cushion. These tears never made their way down my cheek. I was literally crying on the inside. When I plucked the Vision Pro off my face, I saw that the face computer’s seal was soaked. The inner lenses needed a good microfiber wipedown. It was, in a word, disgusting.
Fortunately Apple offers support, though not of the psychological variety. Apple warns that the Apple Vision Pro and its battery are not, in fact, water resistant. (Oops.) “Keep your device and battery away from sources of liquid, such as drinks, oils, lotions, sinks, bathtubs, shower stalls, etc. Protect your device and battery from dampness, humidity, or wet weather, such as rain, snow, and fog,” the support page says. Not a word about tears! Or other bodily fluids. An incredible oversight.
I soldiered on. Using Cinema Mode, I watched a comedy-drama that isn’t categorically sad but always makes me well up at the end. Thanks to the Apple Vision Pro, I sat alone in a hyper-realistic virtual movie theater, watching in anamorphic widescreen format. Achievement unlocked: The headset was soggy. Honestly, I was starting to love this thing.
I text-messaged two friends, “Honestly, I’m starting to love this thing.”
Theater of Pain
During my two-week trial period with the Apple Vision Pro, I gave other apps a go. I iMessaged by tapping my fingers in the air. I sent a few voice notes. I swiped through my camera roll and captured spatial photos. I FaceTimed with a friend. Its most elementary feature, the floating home screen of apps that greeted me when I first logged on, might have thrilled me the most.
Still, I wanted to determine if it was worth $3,804 in emotional pangs.
I rented and watched The Eternal Memory, an Oscar-nominated documentary about a Chilean couple struggling with Alzheimer’s disease. As a meditation on personal and cultural memory, it’s heartbreaking, but it occurred to me that it was no more or less so because I was streaming it from an expensive computer on my face.
I was about an hour into the Norwegian film The Worst Person in the World (which doesn’t seem sad from the trailer, but I assure you it gets there) when I realized the left side of my lip was numb. I searched for my own face with my finger pads. My whole left cheek felt like someone else’s. I text messaged the same two friends, “I think the Apple Vision Pro made my face numb.”
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“Yeah, I ended up lying down and watching movies on my ceiling,” one of them responded. I didn’t totally understand this. Was this to redistribute the weight of the thing? Because he planned to fall asleep in it? He later returned his Apple Vision Pro.
Apple provides two straps with Apple Vision Pro, a thick single strap and a double-strap apparatus. The double strap is designed to release some of the pressure from the front of the face, because of how the lower strap supports the device from the back of the head. I had worn this double strap from the start. And still the Apple Vision Pro’s weight was proving to be too much. The irony of feeling numb when I had sought a heightened emotional experience did not escape me.
During Past Lives, a scripted drama about two Korean childhood friends who reunite in adulthood, I had to pause. The heft of the computer was just too much now. I watched a good portion of the movie on my TV, then slapped the Vision Pro back on just before its poignant denouement. On another night I only made it through 25 minutes of a brutal, award-winning documentary about war-torn Aleppo before I ripped off the Apple Vision Pro.
This was dumb. Not the movies, of course. The notion that a floating TV screen, wide-sized in my living room and controlled by my eyes, would somehow outweigh the Apple Vision Pro’s first-generation trade-offs became apparently dumb.
I never really expected to cry a hundred different ways, but I’d hoped to feel connected in just as many. This is what mixed-reality headset makers promise, along with the assurance that wearers will be “transported.” Instead, I felt so heavily the weight of aloneness—and the headset—that it distracted from the stories that had been constructed in front of me. I didn’t feel any more connected to the movies than I would on a flatscreen TV. It’s misguided to give credit to a computer for manifesting our emotions, instead of simply providing another gateway to them.
I also missed the people in the darkened space around me and the person on the couch next to me. I loved the Apple Vision Pro until I didn’t. I started to dread putting it on.
I cried watching movies in the Apple Vision Pro, which was the whole point, but it wasn’t the Apple Vision Pro that made me cry. It was something much more human than that. When I returned the Apple Vision Pro to the nice humans at the Apple Store, I didn’t cry.
