5 Apple Vision Pro experiences that let you live the millionaire lifestyle (in your living room)

You don’t have to be a millionaire to buy an Apple Vision Pro — but it wouldn’t hurt. Apple’s crazily high-spec’d wearable, a “spatial computer” to use its own terminology for the iPhone maker’s take on a virtual reality headset, costs £3,499 to buy.

That’s not cheap by any stretch of the imagination, and the Vision Pro’s killer spec sheet helps to justify this cost. With its super-high resolution displays, pinpoint accurate motion tracking systems that power a handsfree interface smart enough to note minute taps of your fingers or quick glances from your eyes, and a space-age front-facing screen that gives onlookers a glimpse of the wearer’s face behind the glass of the headset, it’s like sci-fi technology made real.

Apple fully expects people to eventually use Vision Pro just as much as they do their Mac computers and iPhones, and has spent over a decade putting the technology together ahead of its release earlier this year.

But that price tag has been difficult to stomach for some would-be buyers. Which is a shame — because even if you aren’t a millionaire, Apple Vision Pro can make you feel like one.

Apple has thrown the might of its software and content army at the Vision Pro, using its massive scale to secure exclusive money-can’t buy moments from the worlds of entertainment and travel, and experiences that would usually be the reserve of the super rich. Want a private gig from a pop megastar? You got it. Go on an expedition to an untouched wilderness? Sure thing. Money might open doors, but Vision Pro can teleport you right through them.

We’ve been living with the Vision Pro for a few months now, and it’s letting us live the high life without the bank balance to match. Here’s five Vision Pro experiences that can let you live the millionaire lifestyle all in one day...

Courtside NBA All-Star seats: Around £57k

Money can’t buy the VIP courtside tickets at the NBA All-Star games. They’re “who you know” seats, making them basically priceless. But to get seats in the bleachers immediately behind them for the 2025 NBA All Star games taking place at San Francisco’s Chase Center costs a cool £56,971 per ticket.

Or… you could pop on the Vision Pro headset and get a taste of the courtside high-life with the NBA All-Star Immersive Video experience. Shot using 8K, 180-degree 3D camera rigs with spatial audio capture, you’ve got front row seats to watch the Rising Stars face off, a high-flying Slam Dunk contest, the first-ever NBA vs. WNBA 3-Point Challenge with Sabrina Ionescu and Stephen Curry, and the All-Star Game itself.

It’s just a short for now, but the ambition here is to make the headset the go-to screen for live games in the future too.

A private Alicia Keys performance: At least £800k (and maybe as much as £15 million!)

It’ll cost you top dollar to get pop superstar Alicia Keys to pull herself away from her busy schedule to sit in front of your Casio keyboard. According to the Las Vegas Talent booking agency, “you will need to secure a minimum budget of $999,999 - $1,749,998 for Alicia Keys's booking fee” for a private show. That’s just shy of £800,000 on the low end of the scale here.

But even securing the money wouldn’t make it a given — Alicia Keys allegedly turned down $9 million dollars for a 9 minute performance.

Apple has fronted that cash for you though, and if you’ve got an Apple Vision Pro, you can enjoy a personal performance from Keys during a pre-show rehearsal session. Forget nine minutes — you get 20 here, with Keys running through hits including No One, If I Ain’t Got You and You Don’t Know My Name. Save that $20 million / £15 million for the rainy day fund, eh?

Work a day from the Joshua Tree National Park: At least £2k (if you're in the UK)

It’s perhaps the most iconic landscape in the American southwest, and a once-in-a-lifetime trip for many folk. The Joshua Tree National Park’s desert terrain is renowned for its wondrous rock formations and unique fauna.

Flying from London Heathrow for a five night stay near the park with an essential car hire included, a flight with even simple lodgings at a nearby Travelodge will cost you close to £2k. That’s during the palatably-warm month of March. That’s before any other expenses a trip like that incurs, and any weather condition considerations you may need to make.

Vision Pro brings the Joshua Tree to your living room using its reality-blurring Environments feature. With a dial on top of the headset, you can have luscious recreations of locations like the Joshua Tree park, as well as places like Mount Hood, Yosemite and even the moon, merge with your real world surroundings. In fact, you can turn these locations into your office too, with Vision Pro’s floating app interface ready to be seamlessly placed around you. Sure beats lugging a MacBook all the way to the Sea of Tranquility.

Your own personal cinema — Around £25k

Apple Vision Pro makes use of better-than-4K 3660 x 3200 screens, within which virtual displays as big as 100 feet wide can be placed around your home. Download the Theatre app, and those displays are then placed in a detailed recreation of an actual cinema, complete with rows of chairs for you to pick your seat from, ready for a bigscreen movie night from your own collection of movie files.

Getting a 100 foot wide screen in your house is as ridiculous as it is impossible though. At that scale you’re talking about an architectural and engineering endeavour on the scale of the world’s largest cinemas. A private party at one of London’s Curzon screens costs £380 — that’s for a 10am screening on a Saturday or Sunday, so not quite prime time viewing slots. Assuming you’re a millionaire who watches more than one film a year, let’s round that up to two private viewings a month, for a yearly grand total of £9,120.

But you’re going to want to watch TV every day, surely? Getting the living room sorted, even if you scale that screen size down ten-fold for a giant TV — let’s say to a screen a mere 110-inches, like the Hisense 110UX Championship Edition — you’re still looking at a price tag of $20k (or close to £16k). Sure, it’s a 100-foot screen that only you can see — but what’s a better feeling than an empty cinema with your favourite flick?

Well, how about watching a film from the Star Wars planet of Tatooine in your very own Landspeeder? Or doing a Spider-Man binge session from Tony Stark’s Avengers Tower? The Disney+ app takes things a step further by showing you its 3D films from within these iconic fictional locations, immersing you even more in the action on screen. We’re not even going to attempt to calculate the cost of a jump to light speed…

A private viewing of the Mona Lisa: At least £23,500

As anyone who has ever seen the Mona Lisa in person at Paris’s Louvre gallery can attest to, you’ll be lucky to get within 20 feet of the world’s most famous painting. It’s a tourist hotspot, and seeing that smiling / smirking face through the sea of smartphone cameras is a near impossibility. In 2019 luxury tour operator Family Twist was offering private tours of the Louvre for $30,000 (about £23,500) per family of four.

But with Apple’s Vision Pro and the Art Authority Museum app, you can get up close and personal with the masterpiece, without another soul in sight. You can stand right in front of the artwork, rendered in believable high definition, while getting all the information relating to the painting’s history and Leonardo Da Vinci’s other works. Not only that, but the Art Authority Museum app in many ways could be seen as the world’s best digital gallery, given the works it has on show — there’s nowhere in the world that you can see masterworks like Whistler’s Mother, The Kiss and The Scream all under one roof.

Grand total: £907,500

So, £907,500 as a low-end guide to experience just five of the things the Vision Pro has to offer. There’s a bit of back-of-a-napkin maths involved here, and some estimates too — but that’s the nature of what Vision Pro can potentially bring to the table. How do you put a price tag on the sort of things that money can’t usually buy?

And yeah, before you kick off with “seeing it through a headset isn’t the same as the real thing”, consider this — could you see Alicia Keys, the NBA All Stars and the Joshua Tree park all in one day, even if money was no object? You’d need the stars to align, even if you’re sitting on a Scrooge McDuck pile of cash. And even then, you’re going to have to go a lot further than your living room to do so.

This is before considering some of the more practical things Vision Pro brings to the table, too. It can act as a giant ultrawide second screen for your Mac; it has built-in mindfulness applications; it lets you re-live moments captured in videos and photos in 3D; it’s excellent for visualising 3D models. That’s the tip of the iceberg.

Vision Pro has a long journey ahead of it if Apple is to make it the same mainstream success that its iPhone is. There’s still going to be an eyebrow raised in some circles any time something’s placed on their heads instead of into their hands. But if Apple can keep ploughing away at digitising these money-can’t-buy experiences, the money-can-buy Vision Pro will soon find its audience.

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