Apple Vision Pro pre-orders in the US start on Friday, and reporters are getting their twelfth round of hands-on time with the hardware. That officially makes Vision Pro the most reviewed Apple hardware before journalists publish their actual reviews of Vision Pro.

What’s different this time, however, is Apple has allowed reporters to share photos of them actually using Vision Pro. Whether or not that helps or hurts the product is up to you.

Seriously though, The Verge and Engadget have shared the most in-depth and real written reviews of the Vision Pro experience to date.

Victoria Song, writing for The Verge:

The social cues of this thing are going to take a long while to sort out. Admittedly, it was all a whirlwind. I spent a half-hour like a kid gawping at an alien planet — even though I’d never left the couch. But by the end of my demo, I started to feel the weight of the headset bringing me back to the real world. I’d been furrowing my brow, concentrating so hard, I felt the beginnings of a mild headache. That tension dissipated as soon as I took the headset off, but walking back out into Manhattan, I kept replaying the demo over in my head. I know what I just saw. I’m just still trying to see where it fits in the real world.

Dana Wollman, for Engadget:

The fitting took just long enough — required just enough tweaking — that I worried for a minute that I was doing it wrong, or that I somehow had the world’s one unfittable head. First, I struggled to get the lettering to look sharp. It was like sitting at an optometrist’s office, trying out a lens that was just slightly too blurry for me. Tightening the straps helped me get the text as crisp as it needed to be, but that left my nose feeling pinched. The solution was swapping out the seal cushion for the lighter of the two options. (There are two straps included in the box, as well as two cushions.) With those two tweaks — the Dual Loop Band and the light seal cushion — I finally felt at ease.

We expect even more of these testimonials to surface over the next day or so, so stay tuned as Vision Pro inches toward a shipping product… at least in the US.

Had my 4th demo of the Vision Pro this AM and Apple finally let us take a photo with it on.My first three demos (1 in June, 1 in November, 1 in December) were all with the Solo Knit Band and I really felt the weight of the face computer on my face. Today I tried the Dual… pic.twitter.com/DjyYknyme3— Joanna Stern () January 16, 2024