The Apple Vision Pro is making serious waves — from the final boss of a Lightning connector on the battery pack to people wearing the headset where they shouldn’t. But one key gripe reviewers and users alike have shared is the weight making things rather uncomfortable after a while.
Well, the Cupertino crew has responded to these complaints in an interview with Vanity Fair, and to slightly paraphrase (and slightly exaggerate) the two company execs, the short answer is... "deal with it".
Weighing down on you
Richard Howarth, Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple, said that there’s “nothing we could have done to make it lighter or smaller.” Corroborating this, Mike Rockwell, Vice President of Apple Vision Products Group, stated that the team “packed just about as much technology as you could possibly pack into that small of a form factor.”
To be clear, this isn’t necessarily a weight problem specifically, but more of a weight distribution one. The construction of magnesium, carbon fiber, aluminum and glass was always going to be hefty — up to 1.4 pounds specifically.
But with no counterbalance on the back like the battery pack on the Meta Quest 3, all of that weight pushes down on your face. As Mark Spoonauer, Global Editor-in-Chief and Vision Pro reviewer said himself, he had to take “periodic breaks because of the heft.”
Taming a “monster”
What if I were to say the Vision Pro could have been even bigger? That’s what the head honcho Tim Cook had to say to the magazine that the headset “wasn’t wearable by any means of the imagination.”
We can only imagine what this “monster,” in Cook’s own words. But there’s no doubt that more needs to be done in terms of minimizing the tech going forward. As we saw at CES 2024, the parallels of AR glasses and VR headset development are starting to merge (with Xreal Air 2 Ultra kind of kickstarting that process).
That makes me confident that it’s only a matter of time, and a couple of generations of Vision Pro to see the mass of this device become a lot more manageable.
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