Can $3,500 headphones replace your TV? We tested Vision Pro to find out | Top Vip News

The Vision Pro is the strangest product Apple has introduced in my time covering the company. By now, it’s well established that the headphones are impressively cutting-edge and ridiculously expensive.

You could certainly argue that its price means it’s only for Silicon Valley techno-optimists with too much money to spend or for developers looking to jump in on the chance that this could be the next app gold rush. But the platform will need more than those users to succeed.

Part of Apple’s argument behind the price appears to be that the Vision Pro could replace several devices, just like the iPhone did in the late 2000s. It could replace your laptop, your tablet, your 4K TV, your video game console, your phone or other communication device, your VR headset, etc. If you really replaced all of those things, the price wouldn’t seem so outrageous to some.

And those are just the use cases that Apple has gone to great lengths to facilitate for launch. Many of the most important uses of the company’s earlier new product categories didn’t become fully clear until a couple of years and generations later. The iPhone was not originally intended as a meditation aid, flashlight, and other common uses. until third-party developers invented apps to do those things. And Apple’s approach with the Apple Watch seemed to be to simply launch it with a number of possible uses to see what would grab users. (The answer seemed to be health and fitness, but the device’s distinctive emphasis on that took a while to come into focus.)

So while I could write a dense review going through all the possibilities based on my week with the Vision Pro, that doesn’t seem as useful as digging into each specific possibility. This is the first in a series of articles that will do that, so consider it part one of an extensive multi-step review. By the end, we will have considered several possible applications of the device and will be able to make some recommendations or predictions about its potential.

So far, I think there is one use case that is safe, closer to clarity during launch week than any other: entertainment. For certain situations, the Vision Pro is the best device we’ve ever seen before for watching TV shows and movies (among other things) outside of a dedicated theater room. So let’s start there.

My (perhaps too) demanding standards

I know I’m not your typical television consumer. It’s important to keep this in mind before getting too deep.

I bought my first OLED TV (a 55-inch LG B6) in 2016. I previously had a 50-inch plasma TV that I liked, but it only supported 1080p and SDR (standard dynamic range), and Sony had announced the PlayStation 4 Pro. , which would support 4K (more or less) and HDR (high dynamic range) gaming. Game consoles had always driven TV purchases in the past, so I looked for the best I could afford.

I always worried about picture quality before purchasing an OLED, but that interest became more obsessive at that point. I was surprised by the difference and after that I began to find it difficult to accept the imperfections of LCD monitors and televisions. Of course, I always disliked LCD screens, going straight from CRT to plasma to avoid that grayish backlight glow. But the comparison was even harsher once I switched to OLED.

My fellow Ars Technica writers and editors often talk about their beefy multi-monitor PC setups, their expensive home server racks, and other Ars-y stuff. I have some of those things too, but I spend most of my time and energy on my home theater. I’ve invested a lot in it and that has the unfortunate side effect of making most other screens I use seem inadequate by comparison.

All that said, some have argued that the Vision Pro is a solution in search of a problem, but I have a pre-existing problem that it has the potential to solve.

I travel a lot, so I spend a total of at least two months a year in hotels or Airbnb rooms. Whenever I’m at one of those places, I’m always irritated by how their TV compares to the one I have at home. It’s either too small for the space, it’s not 4K, it doesn’t support HDR, it’s mounted too high to view comfortably, or it’s a cheap LCD screen with washed out black levels and terrible contrast. Often, it’s all of the above. And even when I’m at home, my wife might want to see his programs on big television tonight.

I end up not watching the movies or shows I want to watch because I feel like I would be doing those shows a disservice by ruining the picture with such terrible hardware. “It’s better to wait until we get home,” I tell myself.

Vision Pro could be the answer you’ve been waiting for. Those two screens in front of my eyes are capable of displaying an image comparable to that of a mid-range OLED TV in most situations, and I can use them absolutely anywhere.