What Vision Pro can do with your Mac

MacRumors gives a rundown of how Vision Pro can interface with your Mac based on what the keynote video indicated. I forget sometimes I've been scrutinizing Apple keynote videos since 2001 when they would talk at length about things like the number of pipeline stages in PowerPC CPUs relative to Intel, and so not everyone has developed the same eagle eye.

In summary, here's what you apparently can do with a Mac from your Vision Pro:

• Control the Mac's main display in a single 4K-resolution screensharing window called Mac Virtual Display (this is almost certainly why macOS Sonoma added High Performance screen sharing)
• Connect Bluetooth accessories like mice, trackpads, and keyboards to Vision Pro

Here's what you probably can't do:

• Screen share to any Mac over the Internet using the built-in screen-sharing feature (doing so will probably require a third-party VNC-like app like Screens, as Apple will likely keep things simple by requiring being on the same local network and leveraging Bonjour and peer-to-peer wifi)

Here's what you almost certainly won't be able to do:

• Control Intel Macs (much less non-Macs)
• Control multiple Macs at once
• Bring up multiple screens on a Mac
• Run at resolutions higher than 4K (surely a bandwidth limit of high-performance screen sharing, which one presumes sports lower latency and a higher refresh rate)
• Break apps out of Mac Virtual Display to be organized in space (similar to how Parallels allowed Windows apps to be run as free-floating Mac windows circa 2007 with the advent of x86 virtualization in Mac OS X)

Important to get expectations sorted before pre-orders. I'm already trying to think through ways I could conceivably travel exclusively with a Vision Pro and without an accompanying Mac. The 13" M2 MacBook Air has always felt way larger and heavier than it should, and definitely would be for this purpose. If there were ever a time for Apple to rescuscitate the 12" MacBook, it would be now. Maybe I'll settle for a VNC app to remotely connect to a Mac in the cloud? It'd be great if someone could build an Apple TV-sized puck that could run macOS for no other purpose but to be a remote display for Vision Pro.

Of course the real solution would be for a future version of the Vision Pro hardware to support virtualization of macOS… but I'm not going to hold my breath.