The honeymoon period is already over for several owners of Apple Vision Pros.
It’s not by accident that in the last few days, there has been a surge on social media from Vision Pro owners announcing that they are returning their $3,500 headsets. For those of you who are among the first wave of Vision Pro buyers, you have exactly 14 days from the date of purchase to return any goods to Apple.
One of the most common excuses for returns is discomfort. Some claim the headset causes motion sickness and gives them headaches. Another concern has been the device’s weight and the fact that much of it is front-loaded. Product manager at The Verge Parker Ortolani told me he believed using the device caused a blood vessel in his eye to break. At least one other individual mentioned that their experience with redness was comparable. (To be honest, for years users of VR headsets have anecdotally experienced redness and dry eyes.)
“Despite being as magical to use as I’d hoped, it was simply way too uncomfortable to wear even for short periods of time both due to the weight and the strap designs. I wanted to use it, but dreaded putting it on,”made a message about returning the device, Ortolani said.
“It’s just too expensive and unwieldy to even try to get used to the constant headaches and eye strain I was experiencing. I’ll be back for the next one.”
This is not unexpected. Since each human body is different, manufacturing wearables on a large scale for the general market presents challenges. Comfort must always be given up, and this has a disproportionately negative impact on people. When it comes to smartwatches, it frequently comes down to how big and heavy the case is in relation to your wrist. It’s the size of your finger with stylish rings. Unfortunately, a lot of people experience problems with finger swelling or are in between sizes. A short nose bridge on smart glasses or headsets can cause the item to slide off your face or not block out enough light.
It’s not just the gear, though. The Vision Pro is often criticised for not providing adequate productivity for the money. On Threads, a user reported that while staring at Figma screens made them lightheaded, the device wasn’t useful for their job. Another programmer claimed to have headaches from attention problems and that the “coding experience failed to convince [him]” in a post on the social networking platform X.
“If I’m not using this for productivity, and if I don’t love it for entertainment, and if there aren’t enough games to play on it – I just can’t justify keeping it,”One person wrote on Reddit.
For Carter Gibson, a senior manager at Google who oversees community management and moderation, it’s the little things. Work productivity is severely hampered by things like tinkering with Windows and file management.
“It’s difficult to multitask between ‘windows’,” Gibson informed me over on Threads. “The Vision Pro just doesn’t support a number of file kinds. Even while it could seem like something out of Minority Report, I fail to understand how making a slide in the VP would require less energy than doing it with a mouse and keyboard.
This is difficult to predict how this outspoken group of early adopters may affect future developments with the Vision Pro. Many people who announced they would be returning the product also mentioned how excited they would be to test a second-generation Vision Pro. Others underlined that the lack of a game-changing app or comfort was the real problem, not the technology. Furthermore, it’s difficult to estimate how often this event is. Although these individuals are vocal about their experiences on social media, we are unaware of the true return rate or Apple’s internal expectations for the Vision Pro.