Nick Bilton was reluctant to try the Apple Vision Pro. He was already skeptical of the product because of his past experiences with virtual reality headsets. Bilton, a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, found the original Oculus VR headset, now known as the Meta Quest, to be anxiety-provoking, in part because “you can’t see the real world.” For the past 10 years, he says, whenever companies have rolled out new VR devices, “I put it on and then I put it in the closet and I never use it again.”

So when Apple announced what it dubbed the first “spatial computer,” he recalls, “I had absolutely no desire to go and experience it.” But, at the urging of his editor, he agreed to attend a carefully curated Apple demo. “I reluctantly put this thing on and then was completely and utterly blown away by it.”

Bilton discusses this personal epiphany, his recent interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook, and whether the product could change the game of augmented reality on the latest episode of Inside the Hive.

“This is the future,” he tells me, akin to the epochal shifts from clunky desktop computers to sleek laptops and then to superpowerful smartphones. “There’s no question that we will eventually get to a point that the glasses on my face right now will be the Apple Vision Pro. I don’t know when…but that’s going to happen.”

Already, the new device has changed the way he works and the way he relaxes. While wearing the Apple Vision Pro, “it recognizes my laptop, and then I write on an iMac screen in front of me,” Bilton says. “And I have research on this side, and I have music playing on the left, and text behind me, and it’s a pretty wild experience."

In fact, Bilton hasn’t turned on the giant flat-screen TV in his living room a single time since having the Vision Pro. Instead, he admits, “I lay on the couch, and I watch movies and TV shows in IMAX on my ceiling. Because it’s just so much better and crisper and clearer.” To hear Bilton tell it, this technology—combined with gobsmacking advancements in artificial intelligence—will become commonplace all around the world, inevitably, “for better or for worse.”

Naturally, he worries about the world his children are going to grow up in, and considered writing a novel to that effect: Imagine if “technology goes wrong, kills a billion people, whatever it is, and the world comes together and we say, ‘Okay, we have to stop. We have to stop building technology. We have to find the perfect time, where technology was good enough that it helped society but not bad enough that it killed everyone or could kill anyone.’ I love thinking about, What’s that perfect year? Is it 1985? Is it today? Is it yet to come?”