They have three trillion reasons to protect their IP from appearing on the lenses of a Meta Quest or an HTC Vive. All it takes is for the wrong person to post on Threads or Twitter and a pontificator to bloviate into the wrong podcast and it all winds up on a Bloomberg terminal. AAPL has a lot riding on this.

If you imagine a scenario where this works well enough that it's a viable alternative to actually buying a Vision Pro for development ... I can forsee it being a problem for them in terms of (a) direct sales - I could easily see shops fitting out their dev team for 1/4 the cost with Quest Pros instead of Vision Pros but more importantly (b) concern that it will lead to crappy apps being developed. That is, devs using non-Apple hardware will naturally curtail what they build to things that actually work in the dev hardware they are using. That means advanced features of the real Vision Pro won't get properly supported (or omitted altogether).

Of course, that is still miles away from where this is now. But it seems tantalising that it could possibly go there.

I don't think in the short term Apple will budge: neither the Vision Pro nor the dev toolkit are available, so lack of apps is probably a larger issue than some apps not utilizing the Vision Pro to its fullest extent.

Longer term, we will see...

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At 7 million vs 23 million pixels I’d avoid trying to design anything with smallish text