Apple Vision Pro pre-orders are live, Apple releases a 10-minute "guided tour" video for it

19 January 2024

Today Apple has started taking pre-orders for its first "spatial computer", the Vision Pro headset. It will become available, as previously announced, on February 2.

With the pre-order page come more details about the headset, but let's start with pricing. It's $3,499 with 256GB of storage, $3,699 with 512GB, or $3,899 with 1TB. You can get all versions with one-year financing through Apple Card monthly installments.

AppleCare+ for the Vision Pro is $499, and gives you unlimited repairs for accidental damage protection, an "Express Replacement Service", and 24/7 priority access to Apple experts. Before you pre-order, you need to get a measurement for the light seal and head band, and for that you need an iPhone or iPad with Face ID. Then you can add two types of Zeiss optical inserts depending on your vision - it's $99 for Readers inserts, and $149 for Prescription inserts.

To help people come to grips with this entirely new product in its portfolio, Apple has produced an almost 10-minute video that's a "guided tour" of the Vision Pro. Here it is:

Now, in the box you get the headset itself, a dual loop band, a cover, the battery, a light seal cushion, a polishing cloth, a USB-C charging cable, and - you're not going to believe this - an actual charger. So now we're confused - if any iPhone started at $3,499, would Apple afford to bundle a charger with it then? Or would it suddenly stop caring about the environment by "wastefully" doing that? We'll probably never know, unless inflation really gets out of hand.

Let's dive into the specs. The headset is powered by an M2 chip with an 8-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, a 10-core GPU, a 16-core Neural Engine, and 16GB of unified memory. The special R1 chip provides 12ms photon-to-photon latency with 256GB/s memory bandwidth.

Speaking of photons, the displays support 90Hz, 96Hz, and 100Hz refresh rate, with 24fps and 30fps video playback. The micro OLED panels cover 92% of the DCI-P3 color space with a 7.5-micron pixel pitch and 23 million total pixels. You can use AirPlay to morror your view in the Vision Pro on any AirPlay-enabled device.

The Vision Pro has two high-res main cameras, six world-facing tracking cameras, four eye-tracking cameras, a LiDAR scanner, four inertial measurement units, a flicker sensor, and an ambient light sensor. Additionally, you get iris-based biometrics, six mics, Spatial Audio, and there's Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3 on board.

Battery life is quoted as 2 hours of "general use", and 2.5 hours of video watching. You can also use the headset while it's charging. The Vision Pro weighs between 600 and 650g (the variation is due to different light seal and head band configurations available). The separate battery weighs 353g.