Why has Apple made it so difficult to share Vision Pro?

A while ago the verge After publishing my review of the Apple Vision Pro, I left it to sit for some photos. The review unit was fitted for our editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, but I wore it several times as a guest and had a surprisingly good experience. However, that afternoon, I foolishly decided to skip the typical guest setup, which involves about a minute of calibration for the Vision Pro’s eye-tracking cameras. I plugged that thing in, and it wasn’t working at all.

The Vision Pro’s cameras, I immediately realized, were expecting someone else’s eyes. The cursor moved wildly or refused to move. This wasn’t an unexpected result, but it drove home an inconvenient fact: Not only would I have to go through setup again, but I would need to do it every time I wanted to use the headset.

As the verge Covering the release of the Vision Pro, we’ve encountered a number of ways Apple hamstrings device sharing, from not supporting multiple accounts to making the process of purchasing additional parts a pain. It’s not just one The computer you use aloneobviously it’s you own Alone – for reasons that seem unnecessary at best and user-unfriendly at worst.

To set the stage here, I’d like to make a slightly counterintuitive claim: The Vision Pro, despite its solo reputation, seems built for sharing. In its bulky, expensive first generation form, it’s not something most people will want to wear or carry around all day. Its most obvious use is either as a special-purpose device for tasks such as 3D design, or as a personal entertainment device such as a virtual TV set-top box or game console. These are exactly the types of products that can often be used It is owned by one person at a time, but is usually owned by one home – or workplace – and moves around frequently.

The Vision Pro’s hardware facilitates it surprisingly well. Unlike some VR headsets, the device’s Solo Knit band is adjusted with an easy-to-use single dial; No need to resize by readjusting awkward Velcro straps. It’s also easy to change bands if necessary. It requires a light seal that’s placed on your face — and has 17 possible sizes — but it attaches with a simple-to-swap magnetic snap. There’s also a simple biometric login option: face-tracking cameras built inside.

It’s easy to imagine a world where this would make the Vision Pro more valuable as a multiuser device. Like many people, I like to share electronics – my criteria for a good entertainment device include whether my husband will also use it. I don’t see myself wearing the Vision Pro for work all day, but I can imagine wearing it for a few hours to play VR/AR games, then handing it off so he can watch it after me on a virtual big screen TV. Could see. To sleep. Yet the Vision Pro seems designed to undermine that imagination at every turn.

The most obvious problem is the lack of multiple accounts or profiles. Vision Pro precisely allows a person to have a permanent account linked to their Apple ID. It’s similar to the iPad and iPhone, but different Almost every other computing device in my house, from my Android phone to my MacBook to my husband’s humble Nintendo Switch. Even the Meta Quest system, which linked hardware to individual Facebook or Meta logins a few years ago, lets you swap between one another. up to four accounts,

On the iPhone, single-user setup is annoying for privacy and customization reasons, but largely understandable. The lack of multiple user support on the iPad makes little sense — we’ve complained about it for years — but at least some iPads are relatively cheap.

The Vision Pro costs $3,499 and only one person in your household can make full use of it, which makes no sense. The privacy issues are technically on the Vision Pro – allowing someone else to use it without setting restrictions in guest mode gives them access to everything you have on the headset, including your messages. But as my experience shows, they may not even be able to use it enough to get that far. You can start a guest session by pressing the hardware button on the left side of the Vision Pro for four seconds, but you can’t store another user’s information so they can quickly log in the next time without calibration. Basically, imagine that every time you give an iPad to someone else in your family, they have to spend a minute connecting the colored dots.

Then it’s a matter of getting an extra light seal. As I mentioned, I felt fine using the Vision Pro that didn’t fit me, but others have had problems. the verge For example, product manager Parker Ortolani found the Vision Pro’s ventricular seal shape too small and said it caused vision loss in his eyes. An additional seal costs $199, and you can only purchase it one of two ways: ordering online and scanning your face with a Face ID-equipped iOS device, or going to an Apple Store in person and scanning there. To get it done. the verge Video director Owen Grove tried the latter, and he didn’t have a good experience.

“I needed to make an appointment for [a] Demo I just didn’t want to buy an extra light seal,” Owen told me. He had called ahead to confirm the availability of the seals, but after a half-hour demo discovered that most of the seals were sold out, Including her size, which the store told her to buy online. In general, it is natural for a user to buy a few different sizes and not be able to figure out what works best. is limited in form – and makes it almost impossible to share it with certain people in the family or at work.

Things get even more complicated if one or more potential users wear glasses, although this seems more like an inherent inconvenience than an intentional barrier. The Vision Pro uses Zeiss-made prescription lens inserts, which require initial pairing with Apple’s Health app or a passcode stored in the physical card. The good thing is that the interface lets you store multiple lens pairs, so don’t feel like you have to do that. Everyone Time.

Some of these irritations may go away over time, as Apple fixes other inconveniences Vision Pro design quirks With software updates. The company is clearly trying to introduce people to a new category of computer, and at the moment that means controlling the experience as closely as possible. If Vision Pro achieves any level of success, things like the demo requirement may go away. Apple may offer more options specifically for business or education customers shared ipad Feature that allows some multiuser support.

But Apple has also stuck to the idea that its devices are made for just one person, and with the Vision Pro, it can apply that idea in ways it couldn’t before. Even as hardware gets cheaper and more streamlined, it can easily focus on a fundamentally single-user experience – and that’s a shame, when the Vision Pro feels built for so much more.