Apple Vision Pro VS iPad... Save your Money?

The Apple Vision Pro is the cool new tech on the block, and I’ve heard people say it will replace their iPad. You can see visionOS’s roots in the iPad, so here’s how they compare.

Form factor

They couldn’t be further apart: a headset strapped to your face versus a slab of glass and aluminum in your hands. Strapping more than a pound to your face takes getting used to. Apple does what it can to find a Light Seal that fits, but in a couple of weeks it’s never been so comfortable that I forget I’m wearing it. With the straps, cover and battery, it’s bulky, and Apple’s travel case is almost the size of a small backpack. An iPad slips into any bag, and except for the 12.9-inch Pro, it’s lighter.

Chips and displays

Vision Pro has Apple’s newest tech, an R1 chip plus an M2, to handle all the cameras tracking your face and hands, the sensors and the displays. The iPad has up to an M2, cameras, a few sensors, and LiDAR on the Pro.

Vision Pro’s displays are insanely dense at 3,386 ppi versus 264 ppi on iPads. But in pixels per degree, the iPad is actually sharper for reading text at the same apparent size, and long reading is easier on my eyes on iPad.

What Vision Pro has is 3D: depth in photos and video, immersive environments that make you feel somewhere else, immersive games, and 3D blockbusters and videos of your kids like nothing else. The iPad’s display, especially the 12.9-inch Pro’s XDR, is fantastic, but you’ll never get that, except some AR on the iPad Pro.

Cameras

Vision Pro’s stereo cameras record spatial photos and videos that look great and are fun in the headset, but on anything else you’re left with a pretty bad 6 MP image. Almost every current iPad has a decent 12 MP camera, plus an ultra wide on the Pro. There’s no FaceTime camera on Vision Pro; you appear as your virtual Persona instead.

Input

iPadOS was built touch-first: ten or more touch points make it incredibly fast to tap, swipe, drag, game and type, and nothing is more intuitive than your fingers. You can add a keyboard and trackpad, or a stylus for precise handwriting and art.

Penoval and eiP sponsored this video, with the Penoval AX Pro 2 stylus and the eiP Nano Paperlike screen protector.

Vision Pro is much more limited: you look to navigate and pinch to tap. Pinch and hold to scroll or move things, double-pinch to zoom, and push windows away or pull them closer. You can pair a Bluetooth keyboard and Magic Trackpad, but there’s no precise input like a stylus, and no multi-touch.

Windows and space

On Vision Pro, you can build the workspace you always wanted, placing as many windows as you need all around your office or home, and even take over a Mac’s display as a 4K screen any size you like. On iPad, Stage Manager shows up to four apps, and some iPads can use an external display, in front of you rather than around you.

Games

Vision Pro games can be unlike anything you’ve experienced. In Synth Riders, you reach out and dance to capture orbs; very cool and very tiring, and you need to be into techno and in some kind of shape. Fruit Ninja has you throwing stars at flying fruit (don’t hit the pig), and spatial 3D puzzles are almost relaxing. They’re fun and novel, but not something I want to do for more than a few minutes. Then you want a normal game, and while some iPad games work with a controller on Vision Pro, the selection is far smaller. Call of Duty Mobile, which I play a lot, isn’t available, and thousands of touch-first iPad games won’t work without multi-touch.

Work

The iPad has over 15 years of productivity apps: Microsoft Office, task managers, Photoshop, and enterprise apps like Citrix, remote desktop, point of sale, training and device management. I can do my whole day job remotely on an iPad. On Vision Pro, these mostly don’t exist yet, except Word and Excel, and not Outlook.

For video, the iPad version of LumaFusion works, mostly, but making small edits with your eyes and fingers is frustrating; you need a precise pointer. That’s probably one reason Final Cut and Logic aren’t on Vision Pro, along with the fact that you can’t plug anything in: no USB-C storage, no dongles, no hardware security keys. Everything moves wirelessly or through iCloud.

Video

This is where Vision Pro excels: your own giant theater, or the Moon, with nobody’s head in the way. The spatial audio sounds really good, like surround sound. Four downsides, though:

Missing apps. No dedicated Hulu, YouTube or Netflix apps yet. Some work in Safari, but you can’t download for offline viewing.
Glare and lens flare, especially in dark immersive environments, which distracts me as I move my eyes.
It’s on your face, which gets less comfortable and pulls you out of the experience.
It’s isolating, which I’ll get to.

On iPad, basically everything is available, and we’ve been watching video on them for 15 years. The 12.9-inch Pro’s XDR makes HDR pop, though not quite like Vision Pro’s micro-OLED.

Battery

The iPad destroys Vision Pro. iPads have lasted about 10 hours since the original, plenty for long flights. Vision Pro lasts about 1½–2 hours, so you’ll need to plug in to finish most movies, or in my case, to get through Monday morning email.

Isolation

Only you can see what you’re doing in Vision Pro, so sharing is hard, even if two people have one. Want to show someone a funny video, or ask whether your message to your boss sounds too disrespectful? Send them a link or a screenshot, I guess. With an iPad, people can gather around a movie, I can lean over and show my wife a photo, and I don’t look shut off from the room. Sometimes, though, you want to shut out the world and watch something alone, and Vision Pro is pretty great for that.

Price

iPads often start under $300. Vision Pro starts at $3,500. You could buy an iPad for everyone in the family, with money to spare, or put iPads all around your house for a new kind of spatial computing.

In this video

0:00 form factors and hardware
1:47 displays
2:50 cameras
3:29 input options ipad
5:16 input options vision pro
5:57 using with Mac and multiple displays
6:27 app experiences
9:45 downsides to video on AVP
10:56 battery and isolation
12:17 pricing

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