The Sunday Edition — 11.30.25

Welcome to another Sunday Edition, my friends! We received our first official snow fall this week. The snow came down so gently and peacefully, but it will be ushering in full bore winter — we’re looking at -25C this coming week. It’s early, so I welcome it at this time of year. -25C in the middle of March is a very different story.

I’ve written about this in the past — this time of year is full of inspiration and anticipation of the coming new year and new season. I constantly find myself trying new apps, new workflows, new devices, and I constantly start new projects at this time of year. Those projects almost always die out by mid-tax season, and if they survive that productivity nightmare, they die in the long recreational summer months. It’s so rare for a project to make it beyond the summer.

This is why I picked up the Vision Pro — I wanted to see if I could use it to enhance my work or leisure in some unique way. This week, I picked up a Remarkable Paper Pro and just this morning, I started up a trial of Akiflow, Readwise, and Craft. We’ll see which ones come and go, which ones stay, and which ones actually have a lasting impression on my life.

The new just keeps hitting my life. I’m living it up!

Now, counter to that: I am returning the Vision Pro.

Why Am I Returning the Vision Pro?

You’ve heard this story before — in no way am I unique to any other YouTuber or blogger or general user. The Vision Pro is a remarkable device. It has other-worldly technology that will blow the socks off most reasonable people. Immersive content is something to behold, the interaction method seems impossibly well done, and the entire system is capable of transporting you into a different world.

Through all that, it’s not for me.

I remember reading Matt Birchler’s initial review of the Vision Pro:

For me, the major hurdle this product category has is that it just sucks to wear a big headset on your face. It’s heavy, it leaves red marks on my face after 20 minutes of use, it isolates me from the people around me, and it messes up my hair. That can all be worth it if the experiences I have when wearing the headset are good enough, though. As stated in the last section, I simply don’t know what those would be right now. The Vision Pro is a technical marvel that I simply don’t find myself wanting to use for just about anything.

This is effectively my exact experience. Everything comes down to the “hair test” (as Matt put it) — if I can’t look a bit mangy when I come out of the Vision Pro session, then I can’t wear the Vision Pro. For me, this is pretty often — I have pretty poofy hair every three weeks and meetings can run right throughout the day.

It does go beyond the hair test, slightly. The Vision Pro’s potential saving grace was going to be Mac Virtual Display. I thought I could potentially unlock productivity gains with my Mac and gain extra desk space all around me by eliminating unnecessary displays.

My initial expectation was that the Vision Pro’s clarity and resolution was going to be disappointing relative to the Studio Display. In this regard, the Vision Pro passed with flying colors — sure, the resolution doesn’t look as crispy as the 5K Studio Display, but in no way was there discomfort or even disappointment. Inside that headset, Mac Virtual Display looks absolutely wonderful and would normally work for exactly what I was looking for.

Where it fell short for me was in its foveated rendering. For the uninformed, “foveated rendering” is a technique that optimizes graphics by rendering high-resolution images only where the user is looking. The Vision Pro uses this to the maximum — it constantly knows where your eyes are looking (or at least the general vicinity of where your eyes are looking) and it renders that area crispy sharp. The rest of Vision Pro experiences blurs slightly, likely to reduce power consumption, but likely also to improve focus on what you’re looking at.

In general, I have no problem with foveated rendering. I just need the Vision Pro to handle foveated rendering faster. If I have a PDF document beside a tax return and a spreadsheet on the other side of that tax return, I’ll constantly dart my eyes back and forth between the tax return and the reference material around it. Vision Pro’s foveated rendering wasn’t able to keep up to my eye speed when darting between reference materials when working inside Mac Virtual Display. When in the zone, I’d consistently move from one window to the other with my eyes, and it would take a half-second to render the area I was looking at. This half-second produced immediate headaches and strife when working in Mac Virtual Display. I just couldn’t do it.

When I was writing my initial impressions a few weeks ago, I was working in Mac Virtual Display and working inside Ulysses on my Mac. Guess what I don’t do often when working inside Ulysses on my Mac? Reference things beside my writing document. My eyes are situated front and center on my writing canvas and that is that. The moment I attempted to pull out the Vision Pro at the office and use it to have a giant PDF on one side and a spreadsheet on the other, I knew I would be eating my words.

So, in the end, because Mac Virtual Display fell through for me in my productive environment, that left the Vision Pro as a pure entertainment device. At $5,000 CAD, I don’t think I can justify that kind of expense on pure entertainment. The entertainment it does offer is insane, but not worth it to me at that price.

Like most people who have tested Vision Pro “for science”, I’ll be returning this beautiful device. The technology is pure insanity, but it isn’t for me.

The Next “For Science” Test: reMarkable Paper Pro

In a sort of weird, twisted fashion, I’m going to return the Vision Pro — perhaps one of the most mind-bending consumer technology products available — and try out the seemingly opposite end of the spectrum: a reMarkable Paper Pro. Rational buyers will slap my wrist for falling victim to reMarkable’s marketing schemes — the reMarkable is far from the most advanced e-ink devices you can buy right now. But I’ve had the time of my life setting it up this week, finding new templates online, and discovering the meaning of a “distraction-free device”.

For the most part, I felt the “distraction-free device” comment was all just hullabaloo. If you are constantly distracted by your devices, doesn’t that mean you just need to set them up differently? It turns out, for me, this was a marred perspective — you can set up an iPad to be more distraction-free, but you literally cannot do certain things on an e-ink device like the reMarkable. You truly cannot receive a notification. You cannot download Twitter. You cannot send emails (OK, well, you can, but it’s in a very specific, locked-down way).

And it’s been a bunch of fun to dial things back and explore the world of “distraction-free”.

Will it stick? I think it might, but it also may not. Because of the great return policies at this time of year, I actually ordered a Paper Pro Move as well, mostly to determine which size I prefer. I’m drawn to the smaller size right now, but that could change after I take delivery.

I’ll very likely report back on this in the future. My first impressions of far from perfect at this point. Nevertheless, I am finally discovering e-ink and distraction-free. As a friend of mine said, it just seems so “humane” to use one of these.

It makes the Daylight computer that much more intriguing.

"When the cost of failure is low, decide quickly. When the cost of failure is high, slow down." — Shane Parrish

The Second Cup

Ghost Explore

This new page for discovering outstanding websites and personal blogs published with Ghost has been making its rounds around my neck of the internet. For good reason! There are dozens of awesome websites to explore here. I’m going to be adding at least five or six new blogs to my RSS feed reader.

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