Apple Vision Pro battery capacity almost doubles: far more than Quest 3

Apple VisionProThe battery capacity is enormous.

Apple Vision Pro的开箱和评测禁令昨天结束。第一批评测已经发布，开箱视频也揭示了Vision Pro的电池容量。

The Apple Vision Pro has an externally connected battery capacity of 35.9Wh (watt-hours). By comparison, the Quest 3 has an internal battery capacity of 18.88Wh, the Quest 2 has an internal battery capacity of 14Wh, and the Quest Pro has a battery capacity of 20.58Wh behind the rear padding.

You may have heard that the Vision Pro's battery capacity is measured in mAh (milliamp hours). It's 3166mAh, which is more than the Quest 3's 4879mAhfew! So what's going on here? The trick is that mAh is just a valid way to compare batteries with the same voltage output. However, the Quest 3 has a nominal voltage of 3.87 V, while the Apple Vision Pro has a nominal voltage of 13 V. Because of the different voltages, the usual way to compare battery energy capacity is in watt-hours.

While it was initially thought that the Vision Pro's external battery was only used to reduce weight, it's now clear that its true purpose is to support higher-performance but more power-hungry computing hardware.

Even though the battery is external, the Vision Pro still weighs 600-650 grams, significantly heavier than the 515 gram Quest 3. The Quest 3's battery, on the other hand, weighs just 60 grams. However, the battery life of both headsets is roughly the same, about 2 hours.

Conceivably, Apple could have integrated a battery similar in size to the Quest 3 and used its iPhone's A-series chipset to minimize the weight penalty. But it didn't. Instead, the Vision Pro packs a 10-core GPU variant of the M2 chip, as well as a specialized R1 coprocessor to handle input from the headset's many sensors. This gives it roughly twice the performance of the Quest 3, and the video perspective is free of the distortion issues common in Meta solutions.

In fact, it's clear to see that the Vision Pro's battery architecture was chosen to meet Apple's performance goals, not to deliver a lighter headset. Whether Apple continues this strategy in future models will depend on its priorities for the Vision's future: does it want to push performance as far as possible, or does it prioritize getting rid of external batteries?