I tried the Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset — here’s what it’s like
Apple’s new Vision Pro virtual reality headset is displayed during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) at the Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California, on June 5, 2023.
Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images
It’s been nearly a decade since Apple revealed its last major product, the Apple Watch.
Now the company has a completely different kind of wearable, the mixed-reality headset called the Vision Pro, which the company revealed at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday.
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I got to take one for a test drive.
Apple gave some WWDC attendees a controlled demo of Vision Pro, walking us through how to manipulate apps and other content in 3-D space and to train the internal cameras to track our eyes. Many features weren’t available for to try, like Siri voice controls and the camera that will let you capture 3-D images and videos. The Vision Pro won’t go on sale until early in 2024, Apple says, so it likely has a few more kinks to work out before the company lets the public try it all.
Still, my demo gave me a taste of where Apple fits in the burgeoning headset space.
But first we had to deal with my glasses. The Vision Pro isn’t large enough to fit glasses if you wear them. The solution: A system of snap-in prescription lenses. An Apple representative took my glasses and placed them on a machine that could read what my prescription is. By the time I got to the demo room, a customized set of lenses were waiting for me inside the Vision Pro. (You don’t need to worry about this if you wear contacts.)
Then it was time to jump in.
The headset was comfortable, with a cushy fabric lining around the face and headband keeping it strapped my head. But, like every other headset I’ve tested, it started to feel a bit heavy and uncomfortable by the end of my 30-minute demo.
Apple’s new Vision Pro virtual reality headset is displayed during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) at the Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California, on June 5, 2023.
Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images
When I first switched the device on, the external cameras fed the outside world to the sharp displays on the inside. It was crystal clear — almost shockingly so. While Meta‘s most advanced headset, the Quest Pro, feeds you blurry, pixelated images of the outside world, Apple Vision feels like you’re looking through glass, not at a screen.
Then it was time to dive into what the Apple Vision can do. Pressing the dial on the top right of the device, which Apple calls a Digital Crown like the one on the Apple Watch, brings up a menu of app icons. It’s sort of like pressing the home button on an old iPhone. All the standard Apple apps you’d expect to see were there: Photos, iMessage, Apple TV, Safari and so on, floating in the air in front of me.
Apple Vision Pro
Source: Apple
To select an app (or anything else you want to “click”), you look at what you want and then make a pinching gesture with your thumb and index finger to select it. Cameras on the inside of Apple Vision track your eyes and recognize what you’re looking at. The external cameras track your hand movements. Meta’s headset has a similar feature, but it doesn’t work nearly as well as it does on Apple Vision, if it works at all. (Meta ships its headset with a wireless controller for better control.)
Opening an app brings up a window floating in space in front of you, and you can surround yourself with apps if you’d like, almost like working on multiple screens on a desktop computer. The apps look just as crisp as an app on an iPhone or MacBook. That’s significant — until now, I’ve never used a headset with visuals that clear.
I went through several demos like browsing through a library of images in photos, including panoramic photos that made it feel like I was inside the scene. Apple TV is another key app — you can place a virtual movie screen anywhere in the room. I watched a 3-D clip of the latest “Avatar” movie, and it was just as clear as watching on my 4K TV at home.
Apple Vision Pro
Source: Apple
You can also rotate the Digital Crown clockwise to bring the headset into full virtual reality and place yourself in an immersive environment, like a starry night in the wilderness. I especially liked that for watching a movie — it felt like I was sitting in my own personalized IMAX theater.
But VR doesn’t take you fully out of the real world. If someone is in the room with you and you look at them for a few seconds, the headset slowly fades them into view within your immersive environment.
The other demo worth mentioning: FaceTime.
An Apple employee wearing her own Vision Pro in a separate room gave me a call and she popped up in a window hovering in front of me. But it wasn’t her actual face — it was a realistic avatar Apple calls a “persona.” Apple’s demo didn’t let me scan my face with Vision Pro to make my own persona, but the one belonging to the woman I was talking to looked realistic enough that it tricked me into thinking it was a regular video chat at first. It’s a far cry from Mark Zuckerberg’s cartoonish “metaverse selfie” that went viral last year.
Even though most of the focus with Apple Vision is on the visuals, I was equally as impressed by the audio. The Vision Pro has a pair of speakers that sit near your temples and provide a surround sound effect. If you’ve ever used the spatial audio feature with AirPods, you’re already familiar with the concept. But it’s much more pronounced in AR and VR, and it gave me a better sense of presence and immersion than the visuals alone. And even though the sound wasn’t pumping directly into my ears, other people in the room couldn’t hear it. (You can still pair AirPods with the Vision Pro, of course.)
Finally, there’s the price. The crowd at WWDC Tuesday — which was packed with some of Apple’s biggest fans — audibly groaned when the $3,500 price tag popped up on screen. But as someone who has tried just about every mainstream headset to date so far, I can tell you Vision Pro feels like a $3,500 machine. It’s that much more advanced than its next closest competitor, Meta’s Quest Pro.
That’s the state of this technology today: A mediocre-to-bad experience for several hundred dollars, or a premium and visually satisfying experience for thousands.
That alone should tell you the Vision Pro and other devices like it have a long way to go to move beyond a niche product.
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Boaz Weinstein, founder and chief investment officer of Saba Capital Management, during the Bloomberg Invest event in New York, US, on Wednesday, June 7, 2023.
Jeenah Moon | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Boaz Weinstein, the hedge fund investor on the winning side of JPMorgan Chase’s $6.2 billion, “London Whale” trading loss in 2011, is now taking on index fund giant BlackRock.
On Friday, Weinstein‘s Saba Capital detailed in a presentation seen by CNBC its plans to push for change at 10 closed-end BlackRock funds that trade at a significant discount to the value of their underlying assets compared to their peers. Saba says the underperformance is a direct result of BlackRock’s management.
The hedge fund wants board control at three BlackRock funds and a minority slate at seven others. It also seeks to oust BlackRock as the manager of six of those ten funds.
“In the last three years, nine of the ten funds that we’re even talking about have lost money for investors,” Weinstein said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” earlier this week.
At the heart of Saba’s “Hey BlackRock” campaign is an argument around governance. Saba says in its presentation that BlackRock runs those closed-end funds the “exact opposite” way it expects companies to run themselves.
BlackRock “is talking out of both sides of its mouth” by doing this, Saba says. That’s cost retail investors $1.4 billion in discounts, by Saba’s math, on top of the management fees it charges.
BlackRock, Saba says in the deck, “considers itself a leader in governance, but is crushing shareholder rights.” At certain BlackRock funds, for example, if an investor doesn’t submit their vote in a shareholder meeting, their shares will automatically go to support BlackRock. Saba is suing to change that.
A BlackRock spokesperson called that assertion “very misleading” and said those funds “simply require that most shareholders vote affirmatively in favor.”
The index fund manager’s rebuttal, “Defend Your Fund,” describes Saba as an activist hedge fund seeking to “enrich itself.”
The problem and the solution
Closed-end funds have a finite number of shares. Investors who want to sell their positions have to find an interested buyer, which means they may not be able to sell at a price that reflects the value of a fund’s holdings.
In open-ended funds, by contrast, an investor can redeem its shares with the manager in exchange for cash. That’s how many index funds are structured, like those that track the S&P 500.
Saba says it has a solution. BlackRock should buy back shares from investors at the price they’re worth, not where they currently trade.
“Investors who want to come out come out, and those who want to stay will stay for a hundred years, if they want,” Weinstein told CNBC earlier this week.
Weinstein, who founded Saba in 2009, made a fortune two years later, when he noticed that a relatively obscure credit derivatives index was behaving abnormally. Saba began buying up the underlying derivatives that, unbeknownst to him, were being sold by JPMorgan’s Bruno Iksil. For a time, Saba took tremendous losses on the position, until Iksil’s bet turned sour on him, costing JPMorgan billions and netting Saba huge profits.
Saba said in its investor deck that the changes at BlackRock could take the form of a tender offer or a restructuring. The presentation noted that BlackRock previously cast its shares in support of a tender at another closed-end fund where an activist was pushing for similar change.
At the worst-performing funds relative to their peer group, Saba is seeking shareholder approval to fire the manager. In total, BlackRock wants new management at six funds, including the BlackRock California Municipal Income Trust (BFZ), the BlackRock Innovation and Growth Term Trust (BIGZ) and the BlackRock Health Sciences Term Trust (BMEZ).
“BlackRock is failing as a manager by delivering subpar performance compared to relevant benchmarks and worst-in-class corporate governance,” the deck says.
If Saba were to win shareholder approval to fire BlackRock as manager at the six funds, the newly constituted boards would then run a review process over at least six months. Saba says that in addition to offering liquidity to investors, its board nominees would push for reduced fees and for other unspecified governance fixes.
A BlackRock spokesperson told CNBC that the firm has historically taken steps to improve returns at closed-end funds when necessary.
“BlackRock’s closed-end funds welcome constructive engagement with thoughtful shareholders who act in good faith with the shared goal of enhancing long-term value for all,” the spokesperson said.
Weinstein said Saba has run similar campaigns at roughly 60 closed-end funds in the past decade but has only taken over a fund’s management twice. The hedge fund sued BlackRock last year to remove that so-called “vote-stripping provision” at certain funds and filed another lawsuit earlier this year.
BlackRock has pitched shareholders via mailings and advertisements. “Your dependable, income-paying investment,” BlackRock has told investors, is under threat from Saba.
Saba plans to host a webinar for shareholders on Monday but says BlackRock has refused to provide the shareholder list for several of the funds. The BlackRock spokesperson said that it has “always acted in accordance with all applicable laws” when providing shareholder information, and that it “never blocked Saba’s access to shareholders.”
“What we want is for shareholders, which we are the largest of but not in any way the majority, to make that $1.4 billion, which can be done at the press of a button,” Weinstein told CNBC earlier this week.
WATCH: CNBC’s full interview with Saba Capital’s Boaz Weinstein
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