I've had the Vision Pro since launch, and the only thing that keeps me coming back to it nearly daily is the Mac Virtual Display for my MacBook Pro.
It's just so useful to have a huge display wherever you want it - no hunching over looking down a small laptop screen. This is especially useful on a plane where I'm not even able to open the laptop completely due to the tight space.
My main gripe is: Why do I need a separate Mac at all?
Even the original M2 Vision Pro has more than enough horsepower to run the virtual Mac inside of the headset, so it seems like a fake limitation.
I'm looking forward to it being lighter weight and smaller, and for them to make the Mac Virtual Display native to the Vision Pro experience without the need for a separate computer.
The only use case I’m interested in is long-haul flights. How comfortable is it to wear for an extended period? Do people interrupt you to ask you about it? Are you able to use all the features sitting in economy while gesturing?
Expectations vary but I find that regardless of perfect comfort and battery life I don’t want to go more than a few hours without a break. I’ll watch a jumbo movie or a few hours of tv on a flight no problem
Comfort: For me, the answer was “no” out of the box. I had to exchange my light seal twice before I got the right one. This was no charge but obviously it would be great to get it right the first time and it seems like a large number of users never did this and those are the ones who complain most about comfort. Not blaming the users btw, Apple needs to fix this if they care about the product
Onlookers: I always wonder if somebody will bug me and they never have. If you are self-conscious, it might not not be the product for you
Gestures: You learn that they can be done very subtly and you don’t need to bother the person next to you
Overall yes (with some caveats below), it's comfortable enough to wear for a few hours. I'm usually in the window seat and I try to be discreet, so nobody has really asked me about it.
All of the features work well even with no internet (for linking the mac & vision pro). Travel mode takes care of issues with the plane's movement and the sensors work excellent for gesture / tap detection even in complete darkness, and there's never a need for big sweeping arm gestures with the vision pro - you can operate it in a small space.
I bought the belkin headstrap to help distribute the weight, and I imagine the success of that type of accessory is what prompted apple to introduce the new dual knit band. With that extra support I can wear it for a few hours but I definitely have goggle marks on my face for a while afterwards - like you would have after skiing.
Most people don’t care, the only weird/funny part is that they assume you can’t see with it on. I’ve never been interrupted and I wore mine on a flight just a few months after it was released.
Apple won't do that because it means creating a Mac enclave[0] inside of what is supposed to be a secure OS. Apple wants the Mac to be firewalled off from the rest of their product line because the Mac has root access and other things that let the owner tamper with device security. To be clear, you can keep such a device secure, but Apple believes the additional work to support keeping such an owner-controlled device secure is "working for free".
To elaborate on that last bit: macOS ships with a number of utilities and frameworks specifically to detect and remove known-malicious software. macOS also has to operate notarization infrastructure for supporting non-MAS apps, as well as boot infrastructure to deliberately run untrusted or known-insecure OS kernels. None of their other platforms need this[1], because they have strict code signing enforcement. The web browser and developer mode aside, the only code that is ever allowed to run on device is code written by an entity with a business relationship to Apple. Anyone who wants to ship malware has to create a paper trail and expose themselves to getting a legal ass-ramming.
Of course, in practice the enhanced security of iOS and its derivatives is really just an excuse to extract 30%, a price most app developers aren't willing to pay. Putting all your "real apps" behind a virtual display that you have to carry a separate device around for is a way to contrive an inconvenience whose answer is "ship a native visionOS app."
I suspect the whole reason why Mac mirroring is even a thing at all is because Apple realized iPad apps weren't going to cut it on a $3500 VR headset, and this was their quick hack to make the Vision Pro useful while they figured out a way to browbeat their developers into officially supporting it. A task which, by the way, has failed miserably.
[0] No relation to "exclaves" - i.e. bits of security-sensitive code that have been isolated from regular iOS system processes and run inside SPTM's "secure kernel" domain, but can still IPC back and forth. The most likely approach to "Mac enclaves" on visionOS would be enabling Hypervisor and shoving macOS in EL1.
[1] EU DMA notwithstanding - in fact, much of Apple's anger regarding the DMA boils down to the fact that complying with it while keeping their devices secure means shipping macOS-like antimalware infrastructure on other platforms.
It's just so useful to have a huge display wherever you want it - no hunching over looking down a small laptop screen. This is especially useful on a plane where I'm not even able to open the laptop completely due to the tight space.
My main gripe is: Why do I need a separate Mac at all? Even the original M2 Vision Pro has more than enough horsepower to run the virtual Mac inside of the headset, so it seems like a fake limitation.
I'm looking forward to it being lighter weight and smaller, and for them to make the Mac Virtual Display native to the Vision Pro experience without the need for a separate computer.