Apple Vision Pro: The good, the bad, the ugly

Abstract

Apple Vision Pro (AVP), the headset Apple introduced as its first ``spatial computer,'' built by a single, vertically integrated vendor, entered the market in February 2024 and has since accumulated a fast-growing body of primary research spanning surgery, education, accessibility, design, and human-computer interaction. In this paper, we adopt the tripartite structure of Leone's 1966 film to organize a systematic review of this literature: we cataloged the validated, working applications of AVP (the good), the persistent technical and ergonomic limitations of a still-early-generation headset (the bad), and the ethical concerns and structural harms that follow from deliberate design, marketing, and deployment choices (the ugly). The review is built from a Scopus export of 218 records mentioning AVP, which we narrowed to 104 papers (2024--2026) with a primary focus on AVP, using explicit inclusion/exclusion criteria that we report in full, alongside a PRISMA-informed flow diagram of the screening process. We find the corpus heavily skewed toward validating benefits (medicine and surgery, education, and software tooling account for over half of the included papers) and comparatively thin on documented risks or misuse, a pattern we treat as a finding in its own right rather than a limitation to be explained away. We further show that several recurring issues, namely price, simulated social presence, and the gaze-tracking privacy architecture, resist a clean separation into ``bad'' or ``ugly'' using the published evidence alone, since both readings remain compatible with the same data. We close by identifying where the evidence base most needs to grow: independent risk and ethics research, bystander- and equity-focused study designs, and disclosure that would let researchers distinguish an engineering backlog from a structural choice.