At the end of October, I made my way to a Best Buy in uptown Manhattan, plopped down $1,499.99, plus $133.12 in sales tax (thanks, New York), and picked up a Quest Pro. From the moment I pulled it out of the box, its shiny black high-quality plastic, its contact-charging station, and even its hefty one-and-a-half-pound weight all screamed “premium product.” The Quest Pro is meant to feel like a bold statement of purpose.

Meta Platforms’ marketing has continually stressed that the Quest Pro is a virtual reality headset you can wear while working. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has even been urging employees to don them for meetings. It has a mixed reality system called Passthrough, deeply integrated hand and facial expression tracking, a multitasking feature that allows you to open up to three virtual windows simultaneously, and better support for an app called Horizon Workrooms that gives you remote access to the contents of your laptop from inside the headset.

So I put it to the test. I’ve been using the Quest Pro on and off for the last month as both an addition to and at times a replacement for a personal computer. I even wrote this article on it. And my experience was equal parts thrilling and frustrating.