Can a $3,500 headset replace your TV? We tried Vision Pro to find out

Vision Pro display specs

The Vision Pro shows everything to you—TV shows, movies, apps, virtual content, and the real world around you—through two micro-OLED displays that push a combined total of 23 million pixels. A recent Vision Pro teardown by iFixit found that each of these two displays has 3,660×3,200 pixels on less than 1 square inch. (Cut-off corners reduce the overall effective pixel count, but considering that, the total matched Apple’s 23 million claim.) Given the high density of pixels, the Vision Pro achieves a staggering 3,386 PPI (pixels per inch).

Remember when Apple introduced “Retina” displays, claiming that there was a pixel density beyond which the human eye can’t distinguish a difference? The PPI named then was just 300, so 3,386 is more than 10 times that. A modern iPhone lands at around 460 PPI, and Meta’s Quest 3 comes in at roughly 1,218 PPI.

Of course, you also have to consider the distance the display sits from your eye. That’s accounted for in the pixels per degree (PPD). It’s complicated to calculate, but iFixit figured the Vision Pro manages 34 PPD. The Meta Quest 3 clocks in at 25 pixels per degree, so the Vision Pro definitely wins in that face-off. However, consider that 34 PPD is less than half what you’d get from a large 4K TV that’s sitting several feet away from you. Measuring that comparison is made even more complicated by the fact that you can resize the virtual screen and reposition it at different distances.

So when I say the Vision Pro lets you have a virtual 4K TV, I’m being a bit imprecise. The source media is 4K, and if you position it in the right place at the right size, it can give the strong impression of being a 4K TV, but that’s not technically what it is.

I wasn’t unhappy with the resolution when viewing in most situations, though.

Watching TV and movies on Vision Pro

During my week with the Vision Pro, I watched several TV episodes and movies in a variety of situations. I watched Seinfeld and Twitch on small screens set off to the side as one window out of many while I was working, I watched two episodes of True Detective: Night Country on a giant screen while sitting in a night-time immersive rendition of Yosemite National Park, and I even watched an episode of Ahsoka on a 60-inch-or-so TV floating about an inch off one of my bedroom walls.

The resolution looked close enough to 4K to be fine to my eyes, the peak brightness was solid, and the colors were rich. It felt like I was watching HDR video, but it didn’t quite capture the subtleties that my current TV (a 65-inch LG C1) can produce. So, sure, it’s not as good as one of the very best consumer TV panels you can buy today—but it’s definitely better than any TV I’ve ever seen in a hotel room or Airbnb. Those OLED black levels make a bigger difference in perceived picture quality than any other part of the specifications, at least to me.

In other words, I could see this device solving my travel problem. I wouldn’t feel like it’s a waste to watch virtually anything on this thing compared to my TV at home. No, it doesn’t quite match a $2,500 OLED TV, but it’s pretty close, and it’s still better than what the majority of people are watching their shows and films on.

There was one annoyance you don’t get with a TV, though. When viewing particularly bright elements in a dark immersive environment (like the movie theater view for Apple TV+ content), a blue-ish reflection is visible in the bottom of my field of view, as if the lenses are reflecting off themselves. This is not noticeable at all if you’re in a brighter environment (either in passthrough or a virtual environment), but when it’s dark, it can be distracting.

As with other headsets, the field of view is limited. You don’t need your fullest peripheral vision to watch the screen right in front of you, though. It’s more of a concern for some other use cases, but I don’t think it’s something that matters much for this one.

There’s also the comfort question. This seems to vary from person to person. You might have heard that Apple has dozens of possible configurations of the straps and light seals for Vision Pro—that’s why you have to scan your face when you buy one. It’s matching the options to the shape of your face.

I find Vision Pro to be fairly comfortable to wear for extended periods of time. I use the single strap, and it feels like I’m wearing a headband with some extra weight on the front. I’ve worn it for hours on end this week and haven’t felt relieved when taking it off. My experience isn’t universal, though. One of my co-workers complains that it’s always sagging forward and pressing down on his nose and cheekbones. It seems likely to me that he didn’t get the ideal fit despite Apple’s best efforts to match him with one because I don’t feel anything on my nose or cheekbones at all. In my case, the pressure is all on the back of my head and my forehead, and it’s not something I mind or notice.

So I can say that I haven’t had any comfort issues, but I don’t feel confident in promising that you’ll feel the same. If you do have problems, though, I recommend checking to see if Apple will set you up with a different configuration, as that seems key.

As for audio, the in-headset speakers are better than I expected, and for some shows, I didn’t mind just using those. I also synced the current-generation AirPods Pro for spatial audio, which improved the sound. The audio is quite good in that situation, but I was disappointed that I was unable to benefit from the same features with my AirPods Max, which is what I typically use at home in lieu of my surround sound when I don’t want to disturb my neighbors late at night. Normally, AirPods Pro sound good, but AirPods Max sound better, so that’s one area where the device ends up being a downgrade compared to other setups. You can connect whatever Bluetooth headphones or speakers you want; you just don’t get all the bells and whistles.

Lastly, there’s battery life. Apple says it can handle up to 2.5 hours of movie viewing. I found this to be spot on. I was able to get through a 142-minute movie, but it was down to about 10 percent by that time, so don’t expect to do a full The Lord of the Rings marathon on this thing. Fortunately, you can plug the battery pack into the wall for external power, so that’s only an issue when an outlet isn’t available.

What you can (and can’t) watch

Most of the popular streaming services have already released apps for the Vision Pro, and all the ones I’ve tested (Apple TV+, Max, Disney+, and others) work well. Many are similar to the iPad apps they’re based on, with the option to view episodes and movies on a resizable, HDR-capable 4K TV either in augmented reality, virtual reality, or something in between.

Disney+ goes the extra mile, offering Star Wars and Marvel-themed immersive environments and a wide selection of 3D movies, giving you access to more options than you’d actually have with most TVs. (There are 3D movies in Apple’s TV app, too.)

Some players are notably absent. YouTube is missing, though Google says it’s working on an app. And Netflix is also missing, with no current plans for an app to be released. When confirming it wouldn’t offer a Vision Pro app, Netflix was eager to note that you can still watch via the web version of Netflix within the Vision Pro’s built-in Safari browser. That’s true, but it’s a subpar experience. You lose access to some of the neat features for customizing the presentation of the video, and most importantly, the browser version caps out at a low resolution. You can’t watch Netflix in 4K or HDR. It looks quite bad, and I wouldn’t bother watching anything I cared about this way. Bummer.

For all the other services I tried, though, the Vision Pro has strong apps that provide excellent quality to take advantage of the hardware.

What about VR videos?

Generally, you can watch 2D web videos from any source if you’re not too picky, including 360 videos. It’s more of a mixed bag for 3D VR videos, though. Apple hasn’t positioned this device as a VR headset, but one of the most proven and popular use cases for mixed reality headsets of any kind is watching immersive VR video.

The TV app on the Vision Pro has a new section for what Apple calls Immersive Videos. These are 180-degree, 3D videos of fairly high quality. The resolution can be a little fuzzy at times, but that’s the norm for 3D VR videos; I haven’t seen many that look better. There’s a rehearsal performance by Alicia Keys, a short documentary about a woman who walks tightropes in dangerous places of stunning natural beauty, and two nature documentaries—one about real animals, another about dinosaurs. They’re labeled as episodes, so it seems there will be more content to come in these formats.

The immersive videos are pretty cool, but the selection is small right now. You’ll need to head outside of Apple’s playground for more content.

Some online video websites host VR videos in the browser and offer a one-click way to switch to a VR view on other headsets, but I couldn’t find any example of that working. YouTube’s special button for opening the VR view is nowhere to be found. On some other websites, tapping the VR button brings up a splash page saying that you need a WebXR-compatible browser.

However, visionOS Safari is WebXR-compatible, albeit not by default. WebXR capability is gated behind a feature flag toggle in the Settings app. I couldn’t get these websites to work even after enabling it, though. I tested the WebXR demo website and it worked fine, so this seems like something the video websites have to do on their end. I’m not quite sure yet, but it’s too bad because it means a huge swath of 3D video content is currently not accessible on this device. This seems like the sort of thing that could be addressed in the future, though.

On most other mixed reality headsets, it’s possible to download files and watch them in a VR video player. So it’s surprising that Apple just… ignored this. You can download videos to the Files app, but opening them there presents them in a 2D player. Apple seemingly chose not to offer a 3D video player app of any kind beyond those curated experiences in the TV app.

There are some independent apps for this in the App Store, though. The only one I could get working was called Reality Player; it didn’t work on launch day, but its developer quickly released an update that seemed to fix it. Like VR video players on other platforms, it lets you adjust settings for the video type. It supports 180 and 360 videos in both 2D and SBS (side-by-side) 3D, but it doesn’t seem to support the less common OU formats yet.

The quality of 3D VR videos that are supported by this app is absolutely top-notch, though. The OLED displays and the high resolution offer a better viewing experience than I’ve seen on any other headset. That said, the Reality Player app lacks some of the customizations and bells and whistles of some other popular VR video players. You can’t fine-tune the 3D effect or other aspects of the image. The default settings worked very well for all the SBS videos I tested, though.

If nothing else, Reality Player proves that the Vision Pro is not only capable of displaying pre-existing 3D VR videos in popular formats but is excellent at it. It’s just a matter of Apple and third parties putting in the effort to support it. I’d really like to see this because support right now is lackluster, and that seems silly to me, given the wealth of content that already exists out there.

Pour one out for physical media collections

We’ve established that the Vision Pro works quite well as a portable personal TV replacement when you’re using any streaming video app but Netflix, that it works OK for web-based 2D video, and that it’s a nice experience for VR video files, thanks to at least one third-party app.

Unfortunately, it has one limitation that no regular TV you could buy has: You can’t connect external HDMI devices to it. That means you can’t watch your DVDs or Blu-rays, you can’t use your existing cable box, and you can’t connect your Nintendo Switch or PlayStation 5.

This is a much bigger problem for the device’s value as a gaming device than for TV viewing, of course. Most shows or movies you’d want to watch are available over streaming, but that’s not so for games. (I’ll get into more detail about gaming in a separate article.) Even for video content, your TV or computer monitor is a display for anything you want it to be, while Apple’s device is a display for whatever you can stream from the Internet. I know physical media is on the way out, but many people still have big libraries of DVDs and Blu-rays.

Granted, it’s not clear exactly how Apple could address this if it wanted to. It would hardly seem practical to connect your Blu-ray player to a headset with an HDMI cable. Some kind of external box would seem like the most sensible solution, but it’s hard to imagine Apple making something like that. In-home streaming via an app could do it, but that also has its downsides. You could argue this disadvantage is endemic to the form factor.

Nonetheless, we’ve been asking whether this device can replace your TV, so it’s worth noting, because this limitation makes a small dent in the idea that Vision Pro will be worth its price tag as a full replacement of some devices.

There’s portable potential here

One of my wife’s close friends mentioned to me about a week ago that she’d read about the Vision Pro in The Atlantic, and she couldn’t imagine what the use case would be for her. She asked me why I was interested in it because she just couldn’t see the appeal. I don’t think she’s alone.

That issue is what drives this series. These use case-focused reviews will try to uncover what Vision Pro can and can’t be used for, and in the process, we’ll try to figure out exactly what “spatial computing” might mean in the coming years, provided Apple stays the course in supporting this device and its successors.

With TV and movie viewing, we’ve started with an easy win before we start getting into the gnarlier questions. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Apple’s in-store demos of Vision Pro put a lot of emphasis on watching 2D and 3D content passively because it’s the most obvious thing the Vision Pro can do better than any other portable device out there.

It doesn’t quite match my robust home theater setup with a 65-inch LG OLED, fine-tunable colored lights and lighting sensors, and an Atmos-enabled array of Sonos speakers, but that makes sense. As pricey as Vision Pro is, the totality of that home theater setup that I’ve assembled in multiple steps over a few years is still a little bit more expensive, and the home theater is also more specialized. The Vision Pro can do a lot of things my home theater can’t, too.

The Vision Pro provides a better movie-viewing experience than most people have at home—even some people who have put some thought and money into their setups. It’s miles ahead of anything I’ve found in hotel or Airbnb rooms. I haven’t used it on an airplane yet, but I’m excited to; I have no doubt it’ll be great.

Other folks’ circumstances vary, and I could see the Vision Pro being useful for more than just travel. For example, many people share a home with numerous others and rarely get access to the family TV, but they can escape to their home office or bedroom at any time. Chances are good that Vision Pro is better for viewing TV shows and movies than what they have in those rooms.

There are others who just don’t need this. Maybe they live alone and rarely travel, so it’s easy to always watch TV in their preferred environment. Or maybe they just don’t care about picture or audio quality, so that $300 42-inch 1080p backlit LCD hotel room TV is just fine.

And, of course, a great many folks who could benefit from it can’t afford it.

So, yes, the Vision Pro might be able to replace your TV, and it could be a worthwhile investment if you’re a home theater aficionado who can’t always use your preferred setup. Does that make it worth $3,500 on its own? That answer will be different for everybody, but I suspect it’s still a “no” for most. If the capabilities expand and the price comes down, though, I think there is potential here for a lot of people.

Soon, we’ll look at the Vision Pro through some additional lenses: productivity, hardware, social connection, gaming, and more. But we’re off to a strong start, because this device is great for watching movies.

The good

• High-quality display rivals mid-range TVs and even some high-end ones.
• Strong app support, with only one major exception.
• Neat immersive environments to set the mood.
• Spatial audio sounds great with the latest AirPods Pro, and the built-in speakers are better than you’d expect.
• The ability to resize and reposition the display in both immersive environments and your own makes for a flexible TV experience unlike any other.
• It’s comfortable enough to wear for two hours or more to get through a movie.
• Apple is providing solid first-party 3D video content at launch, with more to come.

The bad

• Reflective glow distracts in dark scenes.
• The battery can’t handle long binge sessions.
• The ability to connect to external devices or physical media is limited-to-nonexistent.
• Not all features are supported on other headphones—even Apple’s own.
• Apple seemingly put almost no effort into supporting 3D video content beyond its own.

The ugly

• For most of us, $3,500 and up is way too much to spend, even for a portable home theater alone. The price will have to come down, or the other use cases will have to add up to justify the price.

Listing image by Samuel Axon