Vision Pro is here, and if you were wondering what’s under the hood of Apple’s $3,500 mixed reality headset, iFixit has done another one of its patented teardowns to crack some tightly-glued seals and un-torque a billion-or-so screws.

Vision Pro was bound to be incredibly complex, what with its inclusion of eye-tracking, automatic interpupillary distance (IPD) adjustments, an outer ‘EyeSight’ display—not to mention its array of sensors, chips, etc. That’s what we already knew going in, but it’s something else once the front glass is jimmied open and everything is laid bare.

And the iFixit team had quite the time loosening the front glass, using a heat gun to break what was very likely a smartphone-style glued seal, which also lightly singed the fabric interior light gasket. That’s 34 grams-worth of weight pried off Vision Pro, which overall weighs 600–650 g (including headstrap, excluding external battery).

Image courtesy iFixit

Underneath the glass was a sheet of black plastic, which was removed with relative ease, uncovering the EyeSight display, which the headset uses to not only display a virtual view of the user’s eyes, but also to let onlookers known when you’re busy in an immersive experience. The iFixit teardown gives us ostensibly the first public look at EyeSight under the hood, and the results are pretty interesting.

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EyeSight is covered in lenticular lenses, or similar to the little ridges you might find on one of those novelty holographic illusion cards. A diffusion layer with a similar lenticular pattern placed on top smooths the final image to onlookers, but also reduces its overall brightness.

Here’s a look at EyeSight without that diffusion layer:

Image courtesy iFixit

On the other side of the headset, that lightly singed fabric light blocker pops off easily enough with the help of a plastic pry tool, revealing a bevy of screws and connector cables. That’s when the fun begins of removing a lot of tape, to take out a ton of screws, to remove an impressive number of ribbon cables.

Like with the teardown of Meta Quest 3 from late last year, Creative Electron provided another 360 X-ray.

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For a deeper dive, make sure to visit iFixit’s full teardown. The team isn’t done investigating Vision Pro, and we’re also still awaiting a reparability score and general repair guide. Like all Apple products, it likely won’t score highly—and probably less so due to its extremely complicated design and array of custom parts that Apple will very likely never provide outside of its first-party repair teams.

Notably, some of easier bits to remove were the headset’s magnetically-attached light blocker, and surprisingly, the battery and struts with house Vision Pro’s headphones—both of which can be removed with a standard SIM ejector tool. Still, not much of this teardown was effortless, iFixit says, noting there were “[t]ons of convoluted construction, finicky fasteners, and a bevy of brackets.”

While we’re waiting for the promised reparability score, you can catch the full six-minute video below:

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 3,500 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Christian Schildwaechter

    Apple Vision Pro Teardown…It Broke? (youtu_be/WruHes5MdGA ) is another teardown by Phone Repair Guru, who afterwards reassembled the AVP, taking a veeeery long time. Everything still worked, even Wifi, despite a cut Wifi connector. They bought several AVP and plan to swap parts between them, to test whether Apple has locked/serialized components like with iPhones, preventing 3rd party repairs. An interesting find was that the side arms can be easily replaced by pushing a pin into the small hole next to them.

    A third, more smashdown than teardown, is Apple Vision Pro DURABILITY Test! by Apple Track (youtu_be/Q4aJYb8CNDs ), who tried to break the front glass by running into objects and walls while wearing AVP. When nothing happened, he started smashing it into the wall harder, now holding it to prevent concussion, only getting small scratches onto the glass. He then proceeded to drop it from increasing heights first onto carpet, then hard floor, finally succeeding after several attempts by dropping it from just under the ceiling directly onto the glass.

    The laminated glass didn’t break into pieces, instead just developed a myriad of cracks. Having “loosened” the glass this way, he found that everything behind it was still intact and the AVP in fact continued to work without problems, only the side arms with speakers had been broken during earlier drops. But all in all the glass front was astonishingly hard to scratch or break, and an effective protection screen for the whole device.

    • dextrovix

      Thanks for the info and links, very interesting…!

  • xyzs

    It’s so overcomplicated that it looks like it’s kinda advanced DIY.
    Next version will be made simpler/better/lighter, I hope.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      That is such a bizarre statement, like someone looking at an expensive mechanical clock and saying that it reminds them of their kids playing with Lego, attaching wheels and fences everywhere, too much of everything.

      There is quite a difference between a machine doing a lot of things and therefore requiring a lot of complexity that will make any engineer break into sweat, and someone creating a Rube Goldberg machine involving balloons, bowling balls, toy cars and canons to create an overcomplicated, but funny mechanism for lots of YouTube clicks. You should be able to tell the difference. The next version will be made simpler/better/lighter though, but first the tech to allow that has to be developed.

  • Scientism

    It feels like the decision to put heat producing, weighty, and noisy due to cooling, electronics into the headset, instead of keeping it together with the battery in the external brick, like Magic Leap 2 does, was driven by something like aversion to creating basically an implicit detachable display standard, using which other (competitor made) computing devices could potentially use to connect, and which EU could potentially force them to eventually open to their competitors.

  • PacoBell

    That cooling solution is so bulky. It’s just screaming to be replaced by a couple Frore Systems AirJet Minis.