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This week, Apple finally let a carefully selected few people try out its boldest, most portentous product since 2007’s iPhone. It’s Apple Vision Pro, a spatial computer that is definitely not a VR headset.
It costs a small fortune, some $3,499, yet preorders were wiped out within minutes. It's estimated that up to 200,000 sold before a single normal person tried one. Indeed, Vision Pro is such a hot ticket, you'd be forgiven for thinking it delivers virtual wonderment on such a scale that only the Apple bods wielding the sorcery that makes it nigh on impossible to remove Songs of Innocence from your iPhone could have magicked it into being.
Let us bring you back to reality—you’ll never guess what the Vision Pro's killer app is. Kitchen timers.
Taking One for the Team
Yes, Lord help us, kitchen timers. It’s like putting smart Post-It notes on your pots and pans. But unlike actual Post-It notes, they will never plop into your bouillabaisse or cause a house fire. Because they’re not real.
This is according to The Wall Street Journal’s senior personal technology columnist, Joanna Stern. Stern proved she’s made of stronger stuff than 98 percent of tech reporters by gamely turning up on CNBC with a Vision Pro on her head.
“One of the coolest things I did with this was cook in it. I was able to set timers in my environment, right over the pots,” she said. “[It] was one of the moments where I could really see the future,” she later tweeted on X.
Calling Time
You know the worst bit? Stern isn’t wrong. It genuinely is one of the more compelling real-world uses for Apple Vision Pro—even after you consider the risk of spatters of puttanesca on your aluminum grilles or stubborn turmeric stains on those characteristic Apple white bits.
Apple Vision Pro lets you create virtual hovering timers that, thanks to standard-setting spatial tracking tech, will stay in place even after you’ve turned to look away to check stock prices or interact with an AR dinosaur. Or whatever else you’ll convince yourself makes the three and a half grand outlay worthwhile.
I’ve spent hours poring over responses to Vision Pro from folks like Stern. It’s a compelling rabbit hole. But in the end, depressingly, it all comes back to kitchen timers. And I’m starting to feel we’re all just stuck in a kitchen-timer-themed purgatory from which we may never escape. Here’s why.
A Decade of Kitchen Countdowns
I started writing about tech full-time at the beginning of 2008. It was six months before the Lehman Brothers collapse and everything that followed, but it was also right at the birth of Android.
Before that I worked in mobile phone games. My job was hunting down feature-phone Java games for a publisher, to pitch to UK mobile networks, and occasionally writing point-of-sale marketing copy for 200-KB Lego Batman games no one played. To a person like that, the rise of the app stores was pretty exciting. As it was for most folks with a cursory interest in tech.
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But since then? Smartwatches were meant to be the next frontier of mobile tech, like a miniature take on the smartphone revolution. What did we get? Kitchen timers.
According to a 2023 survey by MacSparky, whose audience is more engaged with tech than most, timers are by far the most common use for the Apple Watch. A 2016 “Smartwatch in Vivo” study by the University of Stockholm’s Mobile Life Center also singled out, you guessed it, kitchen timers as one of the key ways this tech actually slots into someone’s life.
“In Figure 5 we can see a cooking activity involving a couple, where one grates cheese. The cheese grating only takes a few seconds during which the alarm goes off on the other person’s watch,” the study rivetingly explains. “The watch user consults their watch, dismisses the alarm, then moves the pot of pasta (which the alarm indicated was cooked) off the heat. The watch alarm is elegantly incorporated into the cooking with little or no disruption.” Beautiful.
Spilling the IoT
In that same mid-2010s era we also entered the supposed IoT revolution. For a while “internet of things” was on the lips of mainstream newsreaders almost as much as “AI” is today. And those newsreaders had about as much an idea what it actually meant as they do with AI nowadays.
“Life will never be quite the same again,” was the underlying message, without any real clear reason why. In practice, for consumers, IoT meant Amazon Echos flooding folks’ homes, which would largely be used as (drumroll not required) kitchen timers.
According to a 2016 Experian study, two Amazon Echo activities are far and away the most-used. At number one, with 84.9 percent of users, we have timers. At number two with 82.4 percent sits “play a song.”
Sure, IoT is also now weaved into city infrastructure, it helps optimize efficiency in agriculture, and it does all sorts of other things. But companies like Apple are looking for the “next big thing” in consumer tech. Apple has been for years. If Apple Vision Pro boils down to kitchen timers once again, it’s stuffed.
Perhaps Apple knew this all along. After all, it only entered the heady world of multiple concurrent timers in iOS 17, released in September 2023. And tech reviewers can take some of the blame here, as we crowed how, unlike, say, Alexa, Siri was incapable of timing sausages and potatoes cooking simultaneously, like this was somehow a crucial yardstick of technological achievement.
Work Tool for the C-Suite?
Away from the stove, reading about the other avenues for this heavyweight piece of tech may rid you of your appetite for mixed reality. Apple wants us to believe spatial computing will be the new frontier for work—but when you look a little deeper, it all starts to appear regressive.
You control Vision Pro by looking at something and tapping your thumb and forefinger together. It’s your virtual mouse click. The tech that makes this possible is impressive. As a demo, it’s neat. But for doing actual work? That’s not so persuasive.
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“The biggest adjustment is only being able to control exactly what you’re looking at,” says Marques Brownlee in his excellent YouTube walkthrough of Apple Vision Pro. “I don’t think people realize how often they’re controlling things they are not looking exactly, directly looking, at with other computers and other UIs.”
You come expecting that scene from Minority Report and end up with a sort of enforced single-tasking that holds any vaguely tech-literate person back.
Typing, too, can only be performed with the index finger of each hand, making it feel as though you’re relearning to type as part of some physiotherapy exercise. You kind of are, too, as there’s no actual keyboard under your fingertips. Most will give up and connect an IRL keyboard while they connect to a virtual rendering of their Mac screen, which is more than likely open in front of them anyway.
Apple Vision Pro is easier to envision as a serious work device if you’re the kind of person for whom work means talking, or shouting, with people in meetings. Trouble is, this side of the headset's use might make you miss those kitchen timers.
Uncanny Valley
When setting up the Vision Pro you’ll make a “Persona.” This is the version of your face displayed on the outside of the headset on a dim OLED panel, for folks around you, and it’s used when you take part in video calls.
Once again, though, there’s a big separation of expectation and reality. “It looks nothing like the eyes from the ads,” said Brownlee of the exterior eye display.
The simulacrum of your own face for video calls is also a bit of an uncanny valley nightmare. It’s a slightly unreal Sony PS3-grade take on your face, because that’s really what it is. You could easily believe the Vision Pro uses cameras to beam a real-time version of your face, from the blurb. But it actually just animates a static representation of your face you captured earlier. Maybe months or years earlier.
It’s not quite just an animated JPEG. But it’s closer to one of those omnipresent Instagram face filters than you might hope. It's also an unsettling vision of the future that is brewing, one where we end up funneled into reading shitty books written by AI, talking to weird animated JPEGs of friends we no longer meet in person while the polar ice cap floodwaters creep up our ankles. Bring back the kitchen timers.
High-Five for the Engineers
So are we going to have to invoke that tired old trope and say Apple Vision Pro is a classic case of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”? Certainly not from a technical perspective. There are at least two incredible achievements in the Vision Pro. One can be expressed in five characters: 60 ppd.
This stands for 60 pixels per degree, which is an estimate of the visual clarity offered by Vision Pro’s micro-OLED displays. It’s basically the VR headset version of Apple’s Retina display, which became the benchmark for phone and tablet screen quality in 2010.
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It’s why you may see breathless takes about how a Vision Pro lets you pull up a “4K screen” without any reference to how big it is (the actual resolution of this virtual screen would depend on how large you make that display). But that doesn’t matter too much in person, because 60 ppd is not far off the visual acuity of the average person’s vision.
Based on Apple’s 23 million pixel stat, our best bet is that the Vision Pro has a resolution of around 3280 x 3508 pixels per eye, or total resolution of an epic 6560 x 3508 pixels. That’s mega.
You know what’s even more impressive? The Apple Vision Pro’s passthrough, the view of your actual surroundings, is not straight trash. GoPros are bad in low light. Mobile phone video is still 95 percent bad in low light. The Meta Quest 3’s passthrough is bad in any light, despite being the best Meta has made. The Vision Pro’s really is not, and the amount of smarts that go into this is likely staggering.
The Vision Pro outer cameras have to provide 90 fps of image data. The more frames per second required, the harder time a camera will have in lower light. Sure, the passthrough isn’t going to look as good in your moodily lit living room as it does in Marques Brownlee’s clinical studio, but even Joanna Stern’s more relatable kitchen footage isn’t too bad.
Apple’s engineers deserve all the praise they can get—achieving this stuff even with DSLRs strapped to the front of Vision Pro would be tough enough.
Fun Is for the Competition, Says Tim
In classic Apple fashion, however, the company has not embraced the fun with Vision Pro. It is so desperate to convince us that this headset bears almost no relation to “VR headsets” like the Meta Quest 3 and Quest Pro, we’re robbed of big parts of the experience of what is, and should be, the best VR headset ever made.
There are no announcements of the amazing VR gaming titles made for Quest 3 or PSVR 2 yet, and there’s not even a Netflix app. “Our members will be able to enjoy Netflix on the web browser on the Vision Pro, similar to how they watch Netflix on Macs,” a Netflix spokesperson told us.
Then there’s Apple’s obsession with prestige hardware. Aluminum, magnesium alloy, and glass are the core materials here, leading to up to 26 percent more weight than a Meta Quest 3. And that doesn’t count the cabled 300-plus-gram battery you’re meant to stash in your back pocket that Apple really doesn’t want you to think about before you hit the checkout.
It’s as if Apple wants us to believe this hardware is timeless, not something that will seem worthy of a tech heritage museum in five years or so.
People do actually perform fitness activities with Meta Quest strapped in. But John Gruber of Daring Fireball says it’s a no-go for Vision Pro. “There is no fitness-related marketing angle for Vision Pro,” he wrote. “It’s simply too heavy. No one wants to exert themselves with a 650g device strapped to their face. Someday Apple will make a fitness-suitable Vision headset; this Vision Pro is not it.”
What are we left with? Apple’s vision for Vision Pro is a narrow, prescriptive one, because it wants us to take its specific leaps forward as a sign of a break from, rather than a continuation of, current VR hardware. That makes sense when Meta is losing billions from its VR division. But it’s still not clear whether there’s enough here to break through the crust of enthused, well-heeled Apple-fan glassholes and into the homes of normal folks.
But, hey, it’s only a gen-one. And do we still want one? Absolutely, like nothing else in tech right now. How else are we going to keep tabs on our rehydrating pasta?
