Apple’s visionOS 27 Update is Actually Insane (Video)

You can probably recite the joke by now: Vision Pro is a very expensive iPad strapped to your face. I've heard it for two years. However, after going hands-on with the visionOS 27 developer beta, I think that joke is finally running out of road.

Start with Siri, because Apple basically started over. On visionOS 27, the assistant lives in your room as a small 3D orb you can park anywhere - next to your monitor, above the couch, wherever - and it stays anchored there. There's no wake word anymore, either. A new interaction called Look and Speak means you just glance at the orb and start talking. That sounds small. In practice, it removes the most awkward thing about talking to a headset.

The smarter part is context. Siri now understands what's in front of you, whether that's a window floating in space or an actual object on your desk - ask about the real backpack sitting next to you while you shop online, then ask whether the boots on your screen would fit inside it, and it follows the thread. Conversations live in a dedicated Siri app now, synced privately through iCloud, so you can pick an old one back up whenever. And Apple Intelligence seeps into the rest of the system too: Safari sorts your bookmarks by topic on its own, the Passwords app upgrades weak logins with a single tap, and Image Playground will edit a photo from a plain-language prompt.

Immersion is why anyone straps this thing on, though, and that's where visionOS 27 gets fun. Your panorama shots gain real depth - lean in and the foreground shifts - and up to 34 of them can now serve as personal environments, so the backdrop to your workday can be a mountaintop you actually stood on.

Then there's Thórsmörk, the new Apple-built environment modeled on the Icelandic valley. The water in its glacial river actually moves, and if you put a movie on a giant screen there, the picture reflects off the current below you. At night, the aurora takes over the sky. It made the launch-day environments feel dated to me on the spot.

Mac users get the piece I keep thinking about: Spatial Preview, which pulls a 3D model out of your Mac's virtual display and drops it into the room at true scale, with edits syncing live in both directions and SharePlay built in for collaborators. The quality-of-life list is long, too - Wi-Fi that connects up to three times faster after you power on, a redesigned Control Center, notifications you expand with a glance, curved Safari windows, and screen recordings that are finally sharp edge to edge for up to three minutes at a time. Anyone who's tried to make content about this headset knows how overdue that last one is.

The honest caveat: all of this is developer beta software, and Apple can still change or pull features before the public release this fall. But this is the first visionOS update in a while that reads less like a patch and more like a thesis - the headset paying attention to the room you're standing in, not just the windows floating in it.