Apple’s Vision Pro is available for pre-order, but you might want to wait a little longer

Months after Apple announced the Vision Pro mixed reality headset, the device is almost here. It launches on February 2 and you can pre-order it now $3,499.99. That’s the cost of 9 Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth collector’s editions, or almost as many PlayStation 5 consoles.

The Vision Pro’s elevator pitch is that it sends experiences you might have elsewhere, like on your TV, phone, laptop or tablet, to your own personal and private screen, using your hands as controllers. You can use mobile apps, join FaceTime calls with friends, watch movies, mirror your Mac’s screen, play some Apple Arcade titles, manipulate 3D objects, and more. It can apparently do a lot of things, but the entertainment and gaming offering at launch isn’t impressive.

Netflix and YouTube are skipping the Vision Pro (at least for now) – painful exclusions considering Meta’s $250 quest 2 has both, not to mention the ability to launch Xbox cloud gaming support directly from the headset without the need for a console. However, other movie and TV streaming apps are also appearing, including Hulu, Max, Apple TV and several others.

To make up some of that shortfall, the Vision Pro will have exclusive Disney Plus content for subscribers to watch, including dozens of 3D movies, such as Avatar: The Way of Water, Encanto, Avengers: Endgame, and more. This special version of the app also features a number of Disney-themed environments for them to look at.

That may sound boring, but Apple’s pitch for gaming on the Vision Pro is even more so. At launch it will have apps like Games room, What the wave?And Superfruit Ninja that will show off the spatial capabilities of the headset. I haven’t tested these out yet, but I’m choosing to interpret these as tech demos, which will probably get old pretty quickly. According to Apple Vision Pro landing pagethere are “over 100 of your favorite iPad games” available to play on the headset, but none are mentioned aside from NBA 2K23 Arcade Edition And Sonic Dream Team. To play them, you can connect the DualSense or Xbox controller wirelessly. That’s… nice for casual gamers, but it’s not enough to justify the price of this headset.

Presumably, since one of the Vision Pro’s advertised features is the ability to virtually mirror your Mac’s screen via the Sidecar feature, you can should are able to also play Mac compatible games such as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, No one’s heavenAnd Baldur’s Gate 3. But Apple hasn’t advertised that this capability is intended to be used from a gaming perspective. So it’s unclear whether the headset can keep up with high-end titles, or any non-Apple Arcade games for that matter.

Plus, I find it baffling that Apple isn’t positioning the Vision Pro as the ultimate VR headset, even though it kind of is. The specs are hugely impressive, with over 4K per eye resolution, fast refresh rates and OLED displays. It easily surpasses the Valve Index in terms of specs and build quality, as you’d expect from a headset that costs so much more. Even if the Vision Pro enabled wired or wireless VR gaming out of the box (which I’m not sure it does), it wouldn’t have the wealth of VR content already available on Windows via Steam , including the great gaming app for much cheaper headsets, Half-life: Alyx.

I’m not discounting the Vision Pro’s ability to feel like a magical, futuristic device in some use cases. Practical impressions, such as that of The edge, convinced me that it is something I have to see to believe. But at launch, the value of the Vision Pro, especially when it comes to entertainment and gaming, doesn’t exceed my feelings.