Apple Vision Pro News & Reviews

Apple has released a new immersive music video from The Weeknd featuring his latest single ‘Open Hearts’, which is available exclusively on Vision Pro for a limited time.

Captured in Apple’s Immersive Video format, Open Hearts serves up 180-degree immersive views and spatial audio set to eponymous single from the Canadian pop artist’s upcoming album ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow’.

Putting viewers in the center of the action, the music video—or more of a immersive music experience—lets viewers journey alongside the Weeknd on what Apple calls “an electrifying sonic voyage,” as he makes his way through a surreal, haunting cityscape.

The five-minute experience is free on Vision Pro through the Apple TV app, although users looking to view the experience for entirely free can technically request to demo Open Heart at their local Apple Store starting today.

Apple says it’s soon bringing out more experiences for free, including the upcoming Concert for One, which is launching globally on Friday, November 22nd, which invites fans to enjoy intimate performances from the world’s biggest artists.

This follows the release of Submerged, Apple’s first scripted short film, and potentially one of the most expensive immersive videos to date. Also filmed in Apple Immersive Video format, Submerged was filmed on a full-scale 23-ton submarine set made with real metal, modeled after WWII-era vessels.

Apple has released Final Cut Pro 11, which finally lets you edit spatial videos captured with Vision Pro, or iPhone 15 Pro or later.

The latest Final Cut Pro now lets users make adjustments to the left- and right-eye angles on their Mac display, add effects, color correction, and titles to spatial videos.

Of course, thanks to Mac Virtual Display, you can also now edit those spatial videos captured with Vision Pro on Vision Pro.

While the added virtual screen real estate is undeniably better for organizing complex workflows, Final Cut Pro 11 tethered with Vision Pro is still essentially a 2D editing experience, just bigger.

Still lacking is the ability to actually preview spatial videos in-headset while editing—i.e. having a 3D window inside of Final Cut Pro that renders stereoscopically.

Granted, spatial videos can be exported directly to a user’s Photos library after editing, and viewed immediately on Vision Pro, although just not previewed during the editing process, which feels like a miss.

Still, Apple is bringing out its expanded Mac Virtual Display options, which will let users blow up either Mac Virtual Display to a massive 32:9 ultra-wide curved display, which the company likens to two 5K monitors side by side.

For now, the panoramic Mac Virtual Display option is available in beta, which only requires a few simple steps to download, which may come in handy (but not too handy) when editing spatial videos on Final Cut Pro 11.

Apple has finally dropped the ultrawide virtual display for Vision Pro in beta, giving the existing virtual display feature the ability to stretch to wide and ultrawide widths for extra screen real-estate. Out of the box it’s impressive, but default MacOS window management makes it kind of a pain to use. But with the right third-party window manager, it’s even better than I hoped for.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t know just how useful the new ultrawide feature would be. I’ve used Vision Pro’s virtual desktop feature many times before. It’s a great way to get some extra screen real-estate out of my MacBook Air (M2). But it was limited in that it could only really act like a single, large 16:9 monitor.

My productivity workhorse is my desktop PC on which I’ve used two side-by-side monitors for years. For a power-user like me, having the extra width to have multiple things on screen at once is great; constantly minimizing and maximizing apps is a pain. I also combine my dual monitors with additional virtual workspaces, meaning I can group applications together on a specific workspace for a specific task.

I’ve yet to make the leap to a single ultrawide monitor over dual monitors. They’re pretty damn expensive and physically take up a lot of space.

But with a little software update, Apple just gave me an ultrawide monitor that I can take with me wherever I take my Vision Pro. The ultrawide setting essentially gives you two 16:9 monitors side-by-side, but without the seam in the middle if you were using dual monitors.

So not only is my little MacBook Air now able to replicate all the screen real estate that I have with the big setup that takes up my whole office desk, it also has the benefit of no seam in the middle of the monitors. I didn’t fully appreciate how much this would increase the flexibility I have with setting up my workspaces. Now it’s easy to span an app seamlessly in the ‘middle’ of the workspace, while less important apps can be on the flanks. It’s great! But…

MacOS window management is simply not ready to handle ultrawide monitors. Even though Apple just added improved window tiling in the latest version of MacOS, it really isn’t very helpful on an ultrawide monitor.

At best you can ask the system to put an app into any quarter of the monitor, but this results in super-wide apps that aren’t useful in that particular shape. You can make a window go to just one half of the screen, but that gives you a maximum of only two apps on the screen at once.

Without window management that’s actually made for ultrawide monitors, you’re stuck doing a lot of resizing of windows to get them into useful arrangements to really take advantage of all the space you have. Or you do the seemingly insane thing Apple always shows in their marketing: just use randomly sized windows that overlap with other windows while also wasting a bunch of screen space. I mean look, this is literally what they showed when promoting this feature:

Being able to quickly get apps into useful size and position is essential to really benefiting from an ultrawide monitor. The more time it takes to size and position apps, the less often you’re going to actually use the extra space to your benefit.

Luckily there’s many third-party window managers out there for MacOS. And I would argue that having one is essential if you’re using the Vision Pro ultrawide virtual display.

For now I’ve landed on a window manager called Rectangle. With it I can easily set up a ‘main’ app in the center 2/4 of the monitor, then stick apps in the remaining 1/4 on the left or 1/4 on the right. Or I can even stack two apps on the sides, taking up 1/8 of the monitor each.

This works great and makes me feel like I have even more room than I did when using two physical 16:9 monitors (again, the lack of gap in the middle is a surprising benefit because you can put your most important app directly in front of you).

Although Rectangle has the features that make this work well, the app itself is overcomplicated; like using a sledgehammer when all you really need is a regular hammer. There still might be a more streamlined solution out there.

There’s really no reason why MacOS itself shouldn’t have similar window-arranging capabilities that actually make sense for ultrawide monitors, especially now that Vision Pro doubles as one.

Anyway… with the window management issue taken care of, I’m finding the ultrawide virtual display feature even more useful than I expected. When combined with MacOS’s built-in Spaces feature—which allows me to slide easily between multiple ultrawide workspaces—my little MacBook Air feels like an absolute productivity powerhouse. It’s wild to me that it can run five ultrawide workspaces worth of apps and still feel nice and smooth.

For me, the ultrawide option (with some third-party help) has changed Vision Pro’s virtual display feature from something that’s nice to have here and there, into an essential capability of the headset.

Now listen, some of you who have made it this far might be thinking to yourself: “to some extent you’re just praising ultrawide monitors in general.”

You’re not wrong. But the thing is, this one fits in my headset, which means I can bring a highly productive workspace with me anywhere that I would take my laptop.

Vision Pro is still too heavy to want to use this setup all day (and it’s still more expensive than an ultrawide monitor itself!). But mark my words: once Apple has an equivalent headset that’s half the size and half the price, people are going to see huge value from this kind of work setup.