The Apple Vision Pro is the hottest topic in tech right now, with groups of early adopters and the super-rich publishing their first experiences with Apple’s $3,500 headset.
Microsoft executive Omar Shahine posted a few photos and thoughts on wearing such a device on a plane on his Threads account earlier this month, and they paint an interesting picture of what it’s like to travel more than 7,000 miles with an Apple computer on your face to fly.
As you might expect from an early adopter wearing their VR headset in business class, Shahine’s comments on the experience are quite positive.
“My Apple Vision Pro is connected to the in-flight Wi-Fi and I’m watching movies and surfing the Internet using the entire cabin as a screen,” Shahine wrote from his seat aboard a plane en route from Seattle to Dubai. “That’s wild.”
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There are a few things we can glean from Shahine’s first-hand account. First and foremost, the Apple Vision Pro has a travel mode that is explicitly designed for use on airplanes. And according to Shahine, “you definitely have to turn it on, [Apple Vision Pro is not] without usable” on the plane.
Shahine also points out that he used a pair of Apple’s AirPods Pro earbuds in conjunction with the Vision Pro on the plane and that the larger AirPods Max were “extremely difficult to use” with the headset.
What about comfort and battery life? Well, Shahine says he wore the Apple Vision Pro for the longest time for “about four hours,” and the only comfort issues he noticed were “some eye fatigue and internal glare in some of the dark cinema modes.”
Presumably he was able to stay in the headset for so long because he plugged it into his seat’s charger, as we know from our own Apple Vision Pro testing that the headset’s battery lasts no more than 2-2.5 hours at best.
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Finally, we hear that using Apple’s Magic Trackpad with the Vision Pro isn’t a great experience. According to Shahine, “It’s a bit difficult to use a keyboard and trackpad.” [with the Vision Pro] unless the display you are using floats directly above the keyboard and trackpad.
Based on our testing, it’s much better if you can pair the Apple Vision Pro with a MacBook Pro and then use its keyboard and trackpad in Mac Virtual Display mode. But we suspect a Microsoft executive doesn’t want to get caught using one of the best MacBooks.
These are just observations from an early adopter in the first few weeks of use, but they give us useful insight into what we can expect from Apple’s first AR headset in the coming year. And of course we should expect to see it in public, because unlike competitors like the $499 Meta Quest 3, Apple’s headset is specifically designed and tailored for use on the go, in places that are so inconvenient like an airplane seat.
Now, whether you actually want to risk lugging your $3,500 Vision Pro headset on a trip and pulling it out while sitting in an economy class middle seat is a whole other question. But obviously people do. So expect to see Apple Vision Pro headsets used in the great outdoors even more in the coming year.
