What it’s really like to cook with Apple Vision Pro

If you’re addicted to your Vision Pro, with your apps floating around you all the time, you’ll have to cook yourself dinner at some point. After all, you may not be able to afford to eat out after buying one. Cooking with Vision Pro offers some fun surprises, but it’s not all gravy.

There are obvious upsides. Placing timers around your kitchen and having easy access to a recipe floating nearby seem incredibly convenient rather than fiddling with your iPhone. This is what I was most excited to try out.

But the downsides snuck up on me. I had a hard time reading my measuring spoons, nor could I tell apart my sugar from my flour. But worst of all, trying to lick the cookie dough off a large whisk without smearing the Vision Pro proved impossible.

Check out our YouTube video or keep reading below.

Cooking with Vision Pro

There were some great upsides to cooking with Vision Pro strapped on my head. Putting a giant Notes window with my recipe floating in the kitchen, perpetually available to glance at, was a huge step up from constantly opening my phone and scrolling to the next step.

Before, if I left my iPhone sitting on the other side of the room, I had to walk back and get it. If I leave my Notes window on the other side of the room in Vision Pro, I can tap and hold on the headset’s Digital Crown to instantly summon the window back in front of me.

Tossing the batter in the fridge to settle for an hour, I put a timer over the fridge door. I walked around the dining room table, ate lunch and took a meeting. All the while, the timer remained pinned to the fridge.

When I was putting together my pizzelles, I had an assembly line from the bowl of batter to the pizzelle press to a cooling pan to plastic bags.

I put a giant stopwatch floating to the right of the press. As soon as they started cooking, I glanced at the Start button and tapped my fingers. I could keep an eye on the clock, instantly resetting the timer when I opened the press and got another few cookies ready.

I could have done this fiddling around with my phone — or, you know, a physical kitchen timer. But nothing can beat the speed of glancing with my eyes and tapping my fingers. Vision Pro’s easy-to-use gestures work beautifully in the kitchen.

Some downsides of cooking through a camera

The Vision Pro’s passthrough video doesn’t offer a perfect replication of what your eyes would see if you weren’t wearing a headset. It fools your brain when you’re actively using a bunch of app windows and you’re not paying close attention to your environment. But when you’re focused on a real-world task, you never forget you’re looking through a video camera.

Apple recommends you “use your Vision Pro in a well-lit area,” so I turned on all the lights in my kitchen, even at noon in broad daylight. I still found it a bit hard to see.

This led to a few different problems cooking with Vision Pro:

1. I had a very hard time reading my measuring cups and spoons, because the letters are embossed, not printed. I had to move them around under a light to be able to read them.
2. Reading small text with Vision Pro’s passthrough video proves all but impossible. If I didn’t already know that a stick of butter equals half a cup, I wouldn’t be able to get that by reading the numbers on the wrapper at all. I can’t imagine reading instructions printed on a box would be much better. (But that’s a broader accessibility problem not specific to Apple Vision Pro.)
3. If my sugar, flour, baking powder and salt containers weren’t labeled, I would have absolutely no clue which is which. They all look like piles of white. I can’t tell apart their different textures visually like I normally can.

One more tragic pitfall of cooking with Vision Pro

When all was said and done, I was very satisfied with the experience of cooking while wearing Vision Pro. However, cleaning up made one thing obvious: It’s not easy licking the cookie batter off a whisk or kitchen beater wearing the headset.

I’m not just referring to the risk of contracting salmonella from raw eggs. I mean the risk of smearing cookie dough on your $3,499 face computer. With no peripheral vision, I can point my head down, but I can never see my own nose and mouth.

I awkwardly held my KitchenAid stand mixer wire whip in front of my face, extending my tongue to try and lick some of the batter off without touching the Vision Pro. It was possible, but it wasn’t easy. I would feel more confident licking a wooden spoon or a rubber scraper.

Ultimately, cooking with Vision Pro is a mixed bag. Check out some of my other experiments:

• Getting work done on Vision Pro
• Working out in Vision Pro

You can also read our full-length Vision Pro review.