Typing on Vision Pro: How Bad Is It, Really?

A universal piece of criticism against the Vision Pro is typing using the imaginary floating-in-the-air keyboard

which I can back up from experience isn't very good. But people said the same thing about the original iPhone

which ditched a physical keyboard compared to the BlackBerry. And these days, physical keyboards for your iPhone are more of a novelty

than a standard accessory that everybody buys. So to get to the bottom of just how bad the Vision Pro keyboard is

I took a bunch of different typing tests across a bunch of different keyboards

Here's what happened. So we're going to start with a baseline, my personal favorite keyboard

the one that I use with my Mac every day, the Model F by Model F Labs

I wrote a full review of this on Cult of Mac that you can check out if you want. This isn't a membrane keyboard or a mechanical keyboard

This is a buckling spring keyboard. So I'm just going to go to typingtest.com

I'm going to take a three-minute test and, well, let's get started

Okay, so we ended up with 83 words per minute, which is apparently pretty fast

I didn't think I was especially fast as a typist. But this is also my theoretical maximum

So we're going to see how close other keyboards can get. So now we're going to jump into the deep end

If you haven't noticed, I'm now wearing my Vision Pro. So I'm going to open Safari here, typingtest.com, take another three-minute test, same degree of difficulty, and we'll see how I do. Start test

Oh my God. I'm genuinely trying to type as fast as I possibly can in this thing, if you can't tell

Oh, thank God, it's over. Oh, 23 words per minute. On one hand, that's less than a quarter of what I could type on my keyboard on my Mac

On the other hand, that's two-thirds the speed of the average typist

And that's net speed with typos. My typing speed of 30 WPM is actually much closer

That's what? 5 the speed of the average typist And I will also say typingtest doesn do as much intelligent auto as what the Vision Pro would do

I made a lot of typos in leaving out apostrophes, mispunctuating, trying to hit space twice to do a period where it wouldn't do it on typingtest.com

So the net speed should actually be a little closer than what it's telling me is my actual final score

which would put me actually not that far behind what it claims is the average typist

So that's interesting. But this also isn't your only option for typing with a Vision Pro

You can also connect any old Bluetooth keyboard. This one made by Matthias is called the laptop pro

and it's a really nice experience. You put on the headset, and you don't have to repair it every time

You just start typing, and it'll connect, and it'll just work. So I'm going to retake the typing test using this Bluetooth keyboard and see how much closer to my original results we can get

And we're going to start again, same three-minute test, same difficulty. Start test

Oh, there you go. Okay, so here we got 60 words per minute, which is still pretty fast compared to the average typist and well over double what I got

typing on the on-screen keyboard, but that's still only three-quarters of the speed of my Mac in my office

And you might think, well, that doesn't make sense. They're both physical keyboards

They should, in theory, be the same. But there actually is quite a bit of Bluetooth lag that I noticed as I was taking the test

I would go back to the delete key because my fingers knew that I made a typo

but that hadn't appeared on the screen on the website yet, so I didn't know how many times I needed to delete before I started testing

again that led to a lot of issues that when you're taking a speed test really add up and can affect the final score

So now we're starting to build a little bit more of a clearer picture here, but I want to put that number at the very bottom in a little more context

So now I'm back at my desk and I'm going to try doing a handwriting test

Supposedly human handwriting can peak at about 20 words per minute which would be in the ballpark of what you can do on typing on the Vision Pro So I copied the typing test onto my screen here and I going to try to see how much I can do handwriting it

I'm going to have to time and tabulate the results myself, which I'm going to do with the help of this old school iPod touch

I've got three minutes, and let's go. Oh! There we go

I would say I got about a third of the way. So that's what I was able to write in three minutes in that chicken scratch handwriting

And that's how much of the original text it is. Okay, so I just ran the numbers

I wrote 86 words in total, 84 of which were in the original text

I added a few. And I end up with a final net word count of 80, because I missed a few words as well

That puts me at a remarkably similar words per minute compared to typing in the air on the Vision Pro

As stupid as you look, hunting and pecking at nothing in the air with two fingers

you end up with a remarkably similar word count to handwriting on paper

which is very surprising because handwriting feels natural. You know you write as fast as you can

Hunting and pecking on the Vision Pro is incredibly tedious. That three minutes felt forever

I immediately wanted it to end. But there is actually one more thing I want to try

Because the first time I was typing on a Vision Pro, I immediately was reminded of something else entirely

typing on a typewriter. So to prove my theory that hunting and pecking with two fingers on a Vision Pro

is very similar to two finger typing on a mechanical typewriter, I'm going to replicate the test again on this Smith Corona machine that I have in front of me here

I've copied down the same typing test. I'm going to do it yet again with the help of my manual timer here

the iPod Touch. So without further ado, we'll get started. There we go

Okay I run the numbers on this Let see what we get Now there is actually one more way to input text on the Vision Pro and that is with voice dictation

This is what I find myself using most often when I'm just trying to reply to a text message

and I don't have the physical keyboard with me. And I've actually found that voice dictation

is surprisingly very accurate compared to other devices that I've done it on

I quickly discovered that dictation simply doesn't work with the typingtest.com website

So once again, I had to homeroom own solution. I have the reference text here. I'm going to dictate it on here, see how accurate

is. And once again, I'm going to time myself using the iPod touch. So without any further ado

when we hear outlaw, we think of criminals, but outlaws aren't just any kind of criminal. So right

away, I noticed that it got almost all of the words correct. I don't really see a lot of mistakes there

It didn't punctuate it very well at all. It's supposed to automatically place periods, and you can see a few that it got correct here and there

But to be fair, this isn't really a text message that you would send another human

It's not really supposed to be used for blocks of text this big. So the accuracy may not be where you want it, but on the other hand

I was able to dictate this entire thing in literally half the time it took me to type

I ran out of script and had to stop it early. So maybe, typing on the Vision Pro, if you don't need perfect punctuation, isn't so bad after all

So here are the final results, and as you can see, using a physical keyboard is really important

It makes me feel a little better knowing that the virtual Vision Pro keyboard is about as fast as handwriting or using a typewriter

but on the other hand, we moved away from those things for a reason. The Vision Pro Virtual keyboard is still finicky, frustrating, and hard to use with

literally no physical feedback whatsoever. But shockingly, if you really care about speed

unless you are an incredible typist, nothing comes even close to voice dictation

which is way up there on a league of its own. So remember to like and subscribe. I'm Deegrofen

Jones with Cult of Mac