Mark Gurman’s latest newsletter says that Apple remains concerned about the Vision Pro’s weight and is working on making the next generation of the headset lighter.
Gurman also describes the difficulties the company is facing in dealing with the prescription lenses that will be needed for many customers …
Vision Pro weight concerns
When Apple announced Vision Pro back in June, it let selected media representatives try it out for themselves – our own Chance Miller among them – and the weight of the headset was one of the concerns he raised.
I wore Vision Pro for about 30 minutes, and my experience was overall positive. The fabric is soft and breathable, there’s a lot of padding around the eyes, and it felt snug (but not too snug) on my head.
That being said, it’s definitely on the heavier side of things. I could absolutely see getting tired of wearing it after extended sessions.
Apple already made two big decisions intended to reduce the weight. First, it made the design more compact, which had the trade-off that there’s no room for users to wear prescription eyeglasses. More on this in a moment.
Second, Apple eliminated the weight of a battery from Vision Pro by deciding to have a separate, tethered battery-pack. That decision led to a fair bit of criticism at the time it was announced.
But Gurman says in his latest Power On newsletter that the company wants to do more in the next model.
Work on the next Vision Pro remains early, but the company is hoping to make the device lighter and at least slightly smaller. It currently weighs about a pound, and testing has shown that it can feel too heavy for some users — even in short stretches. Apple is considering addressing this on the first model with an over-the-head strap, but making the hardware lighter is a better long-term solution.
Prescription lens headache
Gurman says that the issue of prescription lenses also concerns Apple. The huge variety of lens combinations that would be needed could prove a nightmare for retail stores, which would need to have each combination in stock for try-on sessions, as well as for purchases.
Top comment by Think Different
The custom prescription lens issue is a serious problem but at least Apple is dealing with it. Other companies, such as Sony, are simply ignoring it and leaving it up to third party add on lens makers. The results are very poor. The PSVR2 is so uncomfortable to wear and has such a small sweet spot where the image is sharp that many owners, myself included, rarely use it. The Meta did a deal with Zenni Optical and is shipping $50 prescription lenses on the same day as the Quest 3. It is amazing that the 75% of adults who need prescription lenses have been ignored by the VR industry for so long.
Gurman says that the company is considering instead shipping headsets with pre-installed custom lenses – so you’d try one on in-store, identify the lenses you need, then wait for your custom headset to be shipped to you. But that option is not without its own issues.
The process of offering thousands of different lens combinations has proven to be a headache for Apple’s operations teams. Fortunately, the company may have a solution: shipping custom-built headsets from the factory with preinstalled prescription lenses.
That might simplify the experience for customers, but it also would bring fresh problems. First, built-in prescription lenses could make Apple a health provider of sorts. The company may not want to deal with that. Also, that level of customization would make it harder for consumers to share a headset or resell it. And, of course, a user’s vision prescription could change over time.
Apple Glasses project likely not abandoned
Gurman reported back in January that the Apple Glasses project had been put on hold indefinitely, in order to concentrate on Vision Pro and its successors.
I expressed my skepticism about this report at the time, expressing the view that the Glasses project was always a long-term one, so putting it on “hold” doesn’t make much sense.
Apple Glasses are currently a moonshot project. Making them do all the things expected of them, in a device that has all-day battery life, which has a form factor similar to prescription eye-glasses, and is affordable enough to be a consumer product (even an Apple one), is a massively ambitious project. One that was always going to take many years: It was never likely to follow on in quick succession to the Apple Headset, gen 1 or gen 2.
Gurman doesn’t have any update here but does say that he expects the company to “ramp up development” again at some point.
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