Why did I get a Vision Pro?
I was there on Day One. I took the afternoon off of work to drive to the nearest Apple Store and pick up my order of a 256GB Vision Pro…and while I was there, actually swapped that out for a 512GB instead (and I am so glad I did!) Why did I spend $4,000 sight-unseen on a generation 1 product? Why do I have absolutely zero buyers remorse and would gladly do it all over again? Read on - I have some thoughts!
I’ve been in a weird state with my personally owned Apple products for the last several years. You see, my employer keeps me up to date with a new MacBook Pro every 3ish years, and before that, I was holding on to my own Macs for about a decade. (Fellow listeners of the Accidental Tech Podcast - you could say I’m on the Siracusa plan) Since work was taking care of my laptop solution, and I had a perfectly serviceable iMac 5K (2014) for my occasional personal Mac needs, I was largely using my iPad Pro as my daily driver outside of work. But then the Apple Silicon processors came out, bringing a wide array of awesome and powerful features. My own iMac fell out of hardware support for the latest macOS versions, and for a lot of well-reasoned enterprise security reasons, there was a much harder stance of using a work laptop for personal use, and even moreso using a personal device for work use. I was heading into a big period of technological change, and I had some decisions to make.
I knew I’d need some sort of personal Mac. I wanted another 27” iMac, but it’s clear Apple isn’t interested in making or selling me one of those. I have limited space for my home office as well, so it wouldn’t work for me to have even a 24” iMac on my desk and still have room for a monitor for work. That brought me to looking for a large external monitor solution, and the two obvious choices for me, an Apple purist, were the Studio Display, and the Pro Display XDR. I crossed out the XDR right away because that thing is ridiculously expensive and I’m still mad that you have to pay an extra thousand dollars for the stand. And frankly, I don’t love the Studio Display either. It’s literally the same panel that was in my 5K iMac…which again, was working perfectly well up until I couldn’t run the latest macOS on it anymore for seemingly arbitrary reasons. So, that didn’t feel good either to spend a bunch of money and not get one bit of upgrade out of it. So what I really needed was a good monitor that I could plug my work and personal Macs into and use interchangeably.
But then, in the midst of this conundrum, just as I was getting a little desperate and beginning to contemplate the LG Ultra “Fine”, Apple decided to throw me a (very expensive) life preserver at WWDC ‘23 in the form of the Apple Vision Pro.
Here was a brand new category of product for Apple, and it was promising to offer me a way to show my Mac screen on a massively resizable virtual display, while being a computer itself capable of running apps on-device with great performance, and it would run my iPad apps too? I was instantly sold. Doing some napkin math here:
Studio Display: $1600
Mac Studio (the Mac mini didn’t offer all that I was looking for): $2000
That’s $3600 right there, more than the entry cost of $3500 for the Vision Pro. Plus the Vision Pro was offering that whole “new category of device” vibe, as well as the opportunity to be there right away and experience the evolution of a generation one device. I’ve always regretted not having been able to do that for the iPhone; AT&T wasn’t in my area at the time, so I just flat out could not get one until the iPhone 3G came out. I enjoyed watching the iPad evolve (I was there at the beginning for that, too!) and was excited to see Apple do it again.
I was also very interested in upgrading my home theatre system. I was looking into projector displays, and surround sound systems, and all of the physical space constraints that went along with all of that. And I tell you what, I was shocked at how expensive home theatre products are. So once again here comes Apple offering me a product that was going to take care of all of these desires: a flexible monitor system, a computer, and a home theatre system…and they wanted $3500 for it.
And so, dear reader, to answer the opening question of this post of “why did I get a Vision Pro?” The answer may surprise you: “because it was actually a bargain for me.” The Vision Pro is just a massive green check mark all the way down the page of things I want, and after 2 months of daily use (I’m not kidding - during the work week, I use it for at least 8 hours a day, and on the weekends a bit less but still multiple hours) I can confidently say it was worth every penny I spent, even after splurging for the additional storage capacity and accessories.
Coming up on this blog, I’m going to talk about what accessories I’ve been using and would recommend, the apps I use (both iPadOS compatibility apps, and native visionOS apps), and how I get work done on this device. I actually have a lot of thoughts on getting work done on visionOS, and I absolutely believe Apple and agree with them when they say this device will revolutionize the enterprise. Stay tuned for future posts, and I’ll explain myself!
Until then - have you thought about purchasing a Vision Pro? What are your thoughts on it? Let me know in the comments below!