Apple Vision Pro and More: All The Biggest News from WWDC

Oct 01, 2023

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Everything you need to know about Apple's $3,500 headset, and more.

After years of speculation — and weeks of increasingly intense speculation — Apple has made its biggest announcement in years at WWDC 2023: Apple Vision Pro.

Here is everything you need to know about new and pricey googles from Apple, along with details on iOS 17, some new Macs, and more.

The first wholly new Apple platform since the Apple Watch is here: Apple Vision Pro is Apple's first foray into the world of virtual reality. Or, as they prefer: augmented reality, which is the blending of real life with digital overlays.

It's going to cost $3,500(!) and will be available next year.

It's easiest to think about Apple's approach here as a giant monitor you can wear as opposed to Facebook or other virtual reality companies’ "full cyberspace" approach. There are no controllers either. You'll use Vision Pro with the motion of your hands alone, which the headset tracks with external cameras.

The headset also tracks your eyes to see what you’re looking at, and of course responds to voice with Siri. Perhaps most wild? An external display shows a real-time video of your eyes overlaid on an external display so you can maintain eye-contact with real people, or put a Siri-like animation when you’re fully locked into something digital. It's extremely surreal, but a very Apple-like affordance for human interactions.

Apple's first demo is Safari. That's right—web browsing. Other apps can be arranged around 3D space. A pop-up virtual keyboard is available when voice dictation doesn't cut it, as well as normal Bluetooth accessories like Magic Keyboards. You can even pull up a virtual second screen for your real Mac, which Apple is calling a "full 4K."

Another Apple buzzword creation: Spatial Computing. It certainly sounds euphemistically better than "virtual reality." And because Vision Pro is festooned with cameras inside and out, you can also use it to shoot "spatial photo or videos."

Apple is also proud of how well the Vision Pro will work as a movie theater simulator, at home or while you’re traveling. (Expect to see these in the first-class cabin soon.) Gaming is supported, including Bluetooth controllers, but effectively just versions of iPad and iPhone games projected onto a virtual screen, although Apple is suggestion there will be more "spatial" games in the future.

While the hardware and user experience seems about as polished as you could expect, there's no doubt this is the beginning of a new platform. Disney's Bob Iger made a big "What If?" demo video that showed exactly zero actual innovative pieces of software.

On to the nerdier part of something already deeply nerdy: hardware specifications. The front of the Vision Pro is a single piece of glass, polished for both eyesight and camera passthrough. A digital crown summons the home view and "immersion levels." A single milled frame is the chassis onto which everything else connects, including active air movement for comfort and heat dissipation. (It's more Apple Watch than MacBook, down to the fabric straps and adjustment tags.) Bands can be adjusted and will be available in different sizes and forms. Glasses wearers will have to get custom lenses for the internal eye ports; the Vision Pro is too form-fitting to slip specs underneath.

Apple is claiming "all-day" use when plugged in, which is more of a claim about ocular comfort. With the wearable battery pack, you can use the Vision Pro remotely for up to 2 hours.

The OLED displays inside the Vision Pro are "above 4K" per eye on displays that are physically the size of a postage stamp. This is a big deal—pixel density is what has held back virtual reality systems from replicating the experience of a monitor with small text and buttons.

Spatial audio speakers are built into the band, alongside LiDar, infrared, and cameras inside and out. It's impressive engineering just on the level of existing in the first place; that's a lot of hardware to put into something the size of ski goggles.

The external OLED display sits behind a lens that emulates the look of pass-through for external viewers. It's not showing the real you—it's actually presenting a real-time 3D model of your own face, which is built when you first use Vision Pro by holding the goggles at arm's length and letting it scan your face.

There's a new operating system spin-off, too, of course: VisionOS, with specific libraries and pipelines to develop new features for Vision Pro.

Iris scanning is how the Vision Pro will do security. It's going to scan your eyes each time to make sure you are you, much like FaceID on an iPhone scans your face with an infrared camera.

Vision Pro will be available in 2024 for $3,500. It is undeniably dorky, potentially revolutionary, and at the very least a testament to what Apple does best: being the best customer of leading-edge hardware suppliers across the planet, then tying it all up in a beautiful and humane user experience. Whether it becomes the future of computing or just an extremely sick toy for rich people, it does look like Apple has moved the augmented reality game farther than any other company so far.

Apple's getting its new Mac hardware announcements out of the way up top, which can only mean lots of new announcements to come.

But let's not give the Mac line short shrift. Apple is announcing a new 15-inch MacBook Air, powered by the M2 processor.

The MacBook Air was refreshed last year with an all-new design—a lovely one, in four different finishes—so if the only thing that was holding you back from picking up a MacBook Air was the size of the screen, the new 15.3-inch screen should be what you were looking for.

Previously you could only get a 15-inch model of the MacBook Pro, which is thicker and heavier. (And more powerful, of course.) This should be the lightest 15-inch laptop Apple has ever made. $1299 to start—and shipping next week.

Apple's workhorse desktop just got some more horse. Mac Studio machines are like Mac Mini machines but…bigger. And since Apple keeps rethinking the Mac Pro every few years, the desktop machine is essentially the right choice for video editors, designers, and other heavy-duty users. Which is why this year Apple has added the M2 Max and M2 Ultra processors as options, while leaving most of the Mac Studio otherwise untouched since it launched as a new product line last year.

The price starts at $1,999.

As the most "PC-like" machine in Apple's line-up, the Mac Pro has never gotten much attention outside of specialty customers or developers who need the most of everything—money no object, size no object.

The new Mac Pro—the first with Apple-designed silicon inside—can encode 24 4K camera feeds and encode in ProRes in real-time, as well as accept PCIe gen 4 cards for further upgrades. It's the same design as the Intel-inside Mac Pro, more or less, which befits its utilitarian nature. (But clock those crazy routed mesh screens on the front and back; they’re still beautiful bits of engineering.)

The new Mac Pro starts at $6,999.

iOS is one of the cornerstones of a WWDC presentation, and this year brings no shortage of new features that will come to iPhones new and old this fall.

Personalized Contact Posters — Shoot over your own custom image that displays on anyone else's phone when you’re calling or FaceTiming. Similar to the lock screen design from iOS 16, there will be limited but relatively powerful templated choices for typeface or images. (And yes, it could probably be a lude image if you really are that bold.)

Live VoiceMail Transcriptions — Don't want to open the phone app? Now the iPhone will play a transcription of your voicemail right as it's being recorded.

FaceTime Messages — Use FaceTime like an answering machine and leave video notes for other people on their phone, even if they don't have time to talk.

"Check In" — A new feature uses Messages to let your friends or family when you expect to be home and automatically let them know if something has delayed you.

Emojis Are Now Stickier — Cut-outs from photos, emoji, even videos. You can drop a sticker in-line to Messages and other apps inside the Apple ecosystem. Is this fundamentally different than things already work? No. Is it innovative? Also no.

"NameDrop" — A new layer over AirDrop that simplifies sharing files, contacts, photos, videos…pretty much whatever, simply by bringing two Apple devices to make an initial handshake. It even continues transferring data between phones even if you walk away.

Autocorrect Improvements — Thank duck. Improvements to Autocorrect can now correct entire sentences and also should fight you less when you’re trying to type a word that it doesn't know.

"Journal" - A wholly new app that records both the information your iPhone already knows—music you’re listening to, places you’ve visited—as prompts to reflect as you write down your thoughts throughout the day. You can even let Apple remind you to journal in the morning, afternoon, or whenever. Journal is fully on-device encrypted as well.

"Standby" — A new nightstand mode for iPhones with always-on displays, reminiscent of an old alarm clock, but with the addition of photo carousels, widgets like food delivery updates or live sports scores, or smarthome controls. Expect a little cottage industry of new MagSafe stands that look nice with a sideways iPhone.

"Hey Siri" is just "Siri" — Personally, my Apple Watch already thinks I’m prompting Siri when I’m not at least a couple of times a day. Hopefully Apple has made some major improvements.

iPadOS will pick up many of the same features as iOS, but it comes with a few extra treats of its own, like improvements to handling to everyone's favorite type of file: PDFs.

Quick Interactive Widgets — Check a box or click a button from within a displayed widget in your app grid. This was inevitable, as it was strange that the iOS 16 widgets only opened up apps or popovers.

Improved Lock Screen Designs — Widgets, new fonts, Live Photo animations on waking. Minor, inevitable, but welcome additions. And multiple timers running at once. Even Apple knew this was a silly oversight.

Health — The iPhone's Health app is now available on iPad, as well, synced between all compatible devices as you’d expect.

PDFs — Yes, the humble PDF is getting some updates on iPad. That's great—I still use PDFs almost every day to fill out official documents, for instance—but its still funny that enhanced PDF is a marquee feature for the iPad in 2023. Collaborate in real-time with other people on the same PDF, including drawings and annotations using an Apple Pencil.

Stage Manager Tweaks — The optional new interface introduced last year is getting tweaks that should make it a little more flexible in day-to-day use. That's good, because many people simply didn't like Stage Manager at all.

Apple's latest California-themed macOS update is "Sonoma," the bougiest and booziest Mac operating system yet. Here are some of its key new features.

New Screensavers — More slo-mo buttes and megacities, which now smooth into a desktop image when you unlock your screen.

Widgets on the Desktop — Toss favorite Widgets outside of the sidebars onto your screen. They’ll even tint and fade into the background when a more important screen takes the main stage. No need to install widgets specifically on Macs, either. If your phone is nearby, they’ll show up as a Mac widget automatically.

Gaming — Here's a five-second prediction: Someone will talk about gaming on the Mac and show a game that already exists on several other platforms. [Five seconds later…] They’ve announced a new "Game Mode" that reduces lower latency for controllers, performance, and sound when gaming. Also I was wrong about my prediction. They showed like a dozen games that already exist elsewhere, not just one. But for real game nerds, famous developer Hideo Kojima announced "Death Stranding: Director's Cut," a hit game from the auteur that has been available for a couple of years on dedicated gaming consoles and PC.

Video Conferencing — "Presenter Overlay" puts your head or torso, television-presenter-style, over your slides as you show off your deck to your colleagues, not unlike the app "Mmhmm." But it isn't just for FaceTime; it will work in Zoom, WebEx, and likely most videoconference software.

Safari — Private browsing windows or tabs now lock automatically when you leave them for a while. Family sharing of passwords and Passkeys is now baked in. Profiles let you save tabs and bookmarks per user or use-case—think "Work" or "Guerilla Gardener"—similar to what Chrome has featured for years.

Smart Stack — Widgets for the watch, in another attempt to make the top level view of the Apple Watch useful.

Cycling Workouts — New biking-featured functions that turn your phone into a great clip-on display while biking, including the infamous power zones.

Hiking Workouts — A new waypoint is automatically added to show where you lost LTE connection so you can navigate back to a signal if you need. And like the satellite SOS connectivity added to last year's iPhones, Apple Watch can now use almost any cellular carrier network to make SOS calls. (Presumably at no charge thanks to Apple's relationship with all the cellular carriers.)

Golf & Tennis Training — Pronation, swing measurement, shorts-to-crack ratio calculators are coming to Apple Watch. (Maybe I made up that last one.)

Mental Health — I’m too old and have spent too much time in therapy to be cynical about the improvements Apple is adding to WatchOS and iPhone. As long as they are secure, encouraging good behavior like the new Emotion Logging within the Mindfullness app are welcome. It's all off-the-shelf mental health tooling, but increased access is a good thing.

Vision Health — Nearsightedness, or myopia, affects 30 to 50% of people on the planet, according to Apple. Apple is measuring how long you’re staying in daylight, which can help lower myopia risk in kids. Apple helped make the problem of staring at screens too much, but a new Screen Distance feature helps measure how closely you or your kids are holding the screen to the eye.