It does have power pass through, I have 2, picked them up on release day at the store, power pass through works fine and is how I use it mostly.

My understanding with the “new” lightning cable was that normal USB wouldn’t work since the battery pack also houses a lot of the power regulation tech too to offload it from the headset and this new connector has the ability to manage the power requirements and control other required data between the battery pack and the headset.

Since I am writing already and haven’t posted my thoughts on this thing anywhere I figure I might as well post them here;

Many people consider this device a comical effort from Apple and from the outside it does kind of look like that but having used it for a bit I can say it is a pretty amazing experience and definitely a window into the future of computing and how we interact with the digital world.

I’ve always felt that most tech evolves to be functionally invisible, flint and tinder becomes a lighter and then matches, big clunky wall phones and two way radios eventually became smartphones (wallets, film cameras and so many other devices also got melded into the smart phone), grandfather clocks became wrist watches… all of the tools we use eventually move to be more useful, compact and integrated into our lives. Desktop computing with keyboards, mice, monitors and etc will all be boiled down to a device similar to the Vision Pro but of course smaller and more integratabtle into our daily lives. The Vision Pro is an excellent move forward toward that future. It’s expensive but that is normal for this type of thing and it is following the steps that all cutting edge technology make before it becomes standard. Remember those shoulder bag mobile phones from several decades ago, we couldn’t skip that step to get to the smartphones we have now.

There are many missing features and several things that don’t make sense as to why they did things a certain way. Apple is clearly experimenting here and, yes it is expensive, but no one is being forced into buying one of these things and for every one that sells this type of device will get cheaper and better in the future because this new tech will get feedback and refinement with each user. I am all for it, the more we get things like this the closer it gets to cheaper everyday use.

The price it is at right now, I doubt Apple is getting much in terms of profit, it is loaded with manufacturing techniques and hardware that are not standard or common, this is future tech and cutting edge design and implementation, that always is expensive; like runway model clothes from fashion shows, that is super expensive but eventually the styles, techniques and color and patterns trickle down into the styles of the general population. It will be the same with the Vision Pro. Without stages like this tech moves forward more slowly so having a company willing to experiment like this moves the needle faster and I’m all for it. It’s not for everybody right now but it will be soon, we just have to learn the usability lessons first and the early adopters are paying that price.