# Vision Pro beat the operating room monitor by eight minutes

Source: https://idevice.com/vision-pro-beat-the-operating-room-monitor
Published: 2026-08-05

> Thirty-two tear duct operations, half with the headset. The researchers call it small and preliminary and want larger trials.

Surgeons at UC San Diego ran 32 tear duct operations, half of them wearing an Apple Vision Pro. The other 16 used the standard setup, one 32-inch 4K monitor at the top of the operating table. To see it, surgeons had to rotate their upper bodies about 90 degrees away from a forward-facing posture. [Average operating time was 34.4 minutes with the headset against 42.7 minutes with the monitor](https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/05/apple-vision-pro-speeds-up-surgery/). All 32 procedures succeeded, none had complications, and all five surgeons preferred the headset. The paper is in the journal AJO International, and its authors call the study small and preliminary and want larger trials.

One of the researchers, writing for the investment research firm Asymco, said the headset "is less than 1% of the cost and smaller than almost any piece of equipment" in an ophthalmology operating room. Apple raised the Vision Pro’s starting price from $3,499 to [$3,699](https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/08/05/surgeons-enthuse-about-what-a-great-bargain-apple-vision-pro-is) after a global shortage of processors and memory. [The headset has been used in surgery since it first came out](https://idevice.com/vision-pro-found-its-job-operating-room-mokvlhkv), on surgeons’ own accounts. This study has a control group of 16.

## Sources

- [MacRumors](https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/05/apple-vision-pro-speeds-up-surgery/) (MacRumors)
- [AppleInsider](https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/08/05/surgeons-enthuse-about-what-a-great-bargain-apple-vision-pro-is) (AppleInsider)