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Credit: Apple
The Apple Vision Pro officially drops Feb. 2, but you don’t have to wait until then to express your intent to buy. In fact, you probably shouldn’t wait, since reports suggest the pricey Vision Pro will be in short supply upon launch.
Apple officially opened up pre-orders for the virtual/augmented reality Vision Pro today, Friday, Jan. 19. If you’re convinced Apple’s “vision” for mixed reality is the way of the future and you have a cool $3,499 to spend on a first generation product, you can now claim your place in-line. (Also, what’s it like to be you?)
Apple Vision Pro specs and capabilities
According to Apple’s Vision Pro page, this new headset is powered by Apple’s M2 chip, with an 8-core CPU (four performance cores, four efficiency cores). It has a 10-core GPU, a 16-core Neural Engine, and 16GB of RAM. The new R1 chip has a 12-millisecond photon-to-photon latency, and 256GB/s memory bandwidth to handle processing mixed reality.
When you put on the headset, you’re greeted by 23 million pixels in Vision Pro’s Micro-OLED “3D display system.” The screen hits 92% DCI-P3 (a display standard for color space), and supports refresh rates of 90Hz, 96Hz, and 100Hz. If you’re buying this thing for a virtual cinema, don’t worry: It can play back video at 24fps and 30fps.
Vision Pro has two main cameras, six world-facing tracking cameras, four eye-tracking cameras, one TrueDepth camera (like on your Face ID iPhone or iPad), a LiDAR Scanner for AR, four inertial measurement units (to keep track of your position at all times), flicker sensor (for adjusting the shutter speed of the main cameras to match your lighting conditions), and an ambient light sensor.
Rather than Face ID, Vision Pro us “Optic ID,” which reads the iris of your eyes to authenticate your identity. Wild. It supports Spatial Audio with “audio ray tracing” (hopefully for a realistic sound experience), six microphones, and connects to the second generation AirPods Pro with an H2-to-H2 ultra-low-latency connection. It supports a wide variety of audio codecs, including AAC, MP3, Apple Lossless, FLAC, Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, and Dolby Atmos. Supported video codes include AAC, MP3, Apple Lossless, FLAC, Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, and Dolby Atmos.
You won’t be using this thing long off battery power, however. Apple says it will survive up to two hours of “general use,” and up to two and a half hours of video playback. (So stick to shorter movies if you’re going to go mobile with this thing—if you want to watch something like The Godfather, keep it connected to power, unless you’re cool with a sudden cliffhanger.) It only supports Wi-Fi 6 (no Wi-Fi 6E here), and Bluetooth 5.3. It weighs 21.2–22.9 ounces depending on your configuration. I hear it feels heavy when strapped to your face.
How to pre-order Apple Vision Pro
To get started, head to Apple’s pre-order page for Vision Pro. For the most part, it’s a similar experience to pre-ordering an iPhone through Apple, but as Vision Pro is a more complicated device, there are some key differences.
First, you’re going to want to have an iPhone or iPad with Face ID with you. That’s because Apple will use the camera to scan your face to figure out what size Light Seal and head band you need. (The Vision Pro experience is all about precision, apparently.) You’ll also want to make sure your Apple Store app is up to date, so if you don’t have the app, download it from the App Store, or update it if you do.
Finally, if you wear glasses, you’ll need your prescription on-hand. That’s because you can’t wear your glasses with Vision Pro, so Apple will make you custom prescription inserts from Zeiss that fit into the device. They won’t do it for free, though: Readers cost an extra $99, while a true prescription costs an extra $149. (Sorry, I can’t afford new glasses this year, I needed a Vision Pro.)
Once your Vision Pro is fit perfectly to your head, face, and eyes, you get to choose your storage size. Again, here’s another potential price hike: That $3,499 base price gets you 256GB of storage. If you think you’ll need more, you can bump it up to 512GB for $3,699, or 1TB for $3,899. Again, those prices are without extra fees associated with prescriptions, so you could be looking at over $4,000 for a maxed out Vision Pro made to fit to your eyes.
Apple is happy to let you finance Vision Pro through Apple Card monthly installments if the hefty price tag feels a little too much all at once. There’s no interest, and you still get the full 3% Daily Cash (that’s as much as $121.44), so if you’re confident you’ll be able to make the payments, it might not be a bad deal. Relatively speaking.
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