Introduction

Today, I picked up my Apple Vision Pro (AVP) at the Apple Store. I won’t bother you with yet another unboxing video. When you pick it up at the store, they give you a nice custom-made shopping bag for the AVP’s box (left). They give you about a 30-minute guided tour with a store-owned demo headset, and when you are all done with the tour, they give you yours in a sealed box.

iFixit asked if I would help identify some of the optics during their AVP “Extreme Unboxing” (it is Apple; we need a better word for “teardown”). I have helped iFixit in the past with their similar efforts on the Magic Leap One and Meta Quest Pro and readily agreed to help in any way that I could.

iFixit’s “Extreme Unboxing”

As per iFixit’s usual habit, they took the unboxing of a new product to the extreme. They published the first of several videos of their extreme unboxing of the AVP today (Feb. 3rd, 2023). You can expect more videos to follow.

Perhaps the most unexpected thing iFixit showed in the first iFixit video is that the Eyesight (front display) has more than a single lenticular lens in front of the Eyesight’s OLED display. There is a second lens-like element and/or a brightness enhancement film (BEF). BEF films a series of triangular refraction elements that act in one direction, similar to a lenticular lens.

iFixit also showed a glimpse of the AVP’s pancake optics and the OLED microdisplay used for each eye toward the end of the video. The AVP uses pancake optics as described in Apple Vision Pro (Part 4) – Hypervision Pancake Optics Analysis.

Closing

That’s it for today. I mostly wanted to let everyone know about the iFixit extreme unboxing. I have a lot of work to do to analyze the Apple Vision Pro.