Apple’s developer conference opened on Monday at Apple Park with Tim Cook on stage, and for the first time in nine years the company announced a new category of product. The analysts had been right: it is a headset. Apple refuses to call it that — the phrase is “spatial computer” — and it is called Vision Pro.
Vision Pro
A ski-goggle-shaped device with two micro-OLED screens totalling 23 million pixels, an M2 chip for computing and a new R1 chip for processing the twelve cameras, five sensors and six microphones that watch the world and the wearer. There is no controller: you look at a button to select it, tap your fingers together to click, and speak to type. Apps from the iPhone and iPad float in the room; a Mac’s screen can be pulled into the air; FaceTime shows a scanned “Persona” of your face because the real one is behind glass. A dial blends the real room with a virtual one. It runs visionOS, with Safari, Photos, Music, FaceTime and games at launch. It costs $3,499, ships in the United States in early 2024, and Apple did not say when anywhere else.
Everything before it
- 15-inch MacBook Air — the large Air users have asked for, 11.5 mm thin, M2, 18 hours of battery, four colours, $1,299. Available next week.
- Mac Studio and Mac Pro with the new M2 Ultra; the Mac Pro, the last Intel Mac, finally moves to Apple silicon, from $6,999.
- iOS 17 — StandBy turns a charging iPhone on its side into a bedside clock and smart display; Check In tells a contact when you reach home and alerts them if you do not; NameDrop shares contact details by touching two iPhones; voice messages are transcribed; the Phone app gets personalised contact posters and live voicemail transcription.
- iPadOS 17 — a customisable lock screen, interactive widgets, and collaborative PDF editing.
- Journal, a new end-to-end-encrypted diary app for iPhone, later this year.
- macOS Sonoma (widgets on the desktop, Safari profiles), watchOS 10 (a redesign around full-screen widgets), tvOS 17 (FaceTime on the TV), SharePlay in Apple Music.
The conference runs until 9 June; the software ships in September.
From Dhaka
$3,499 is about Tk3.8 lakh before duty, or roughly Tk5 lakh once a grey importer has landed it — the price of a small car’s down payment, for a device that is US-only next year and needs an Apple ID with a US payment method to buy apps. It will appear in Bashundhara City’s Apple corners as a curiosity in 2024, and the developers who matter for it are in Cupertino, not here. The announcements that reach Bangladesh are the ordinary ones: the 15-inch Air, which will sell, and iOS 17’s Check In, which is the feature every parent of a university student in this city will switch on the day it arrives.
What happened when it shipped
Vision Pro went on sale in the United States in February 2024 at the announced price, and the reception was admiring and brief. Reviewers agreed the display and the hand-and-eye control were genuinely without precedent; they also found it heavy, isolating and short of things to do. Returns were widely reported, usage fell off after the first weeks, and Apple’s own output of made-for-Vision content slowed.
It is the clearest recent case of a device that is technically remarkable and unresolved as a product — which is a different failure from a bad one, and usually a more expensive one to recover from.
