Go look for other headsets with similar features and especially optical quality. You won’t find anything much cheaper. The quest (even considering the pro) and pico devices are toys in comparison

Right. If this was actually a general purpose VR headset, then it would be competitive.

Instead, it's a toy. It's not allowed to be anything more.

What do you mean by general purpose VR? Toy? Without defining how it falls short of your expectations, you just come across like you’re ranting.

This thing is literally not able to run arbitrary software. It is only allowed to run Apple's OS, and only allowed to install software from Apple's app store, written with Apple's app toolchain, and compiled with Apple's app libraries.

There is a whole world of software that this device will never touch, simply because it's not allowed.

Oh ffs. So really for you the quality of the hardware, the price, the whole experience—these things are irrelevant because you can’t sideload. It’s an Apple product what did you expect? “This is the year of Linux on desktop” people are not the intended customers.

It's not irrelevant! Quite the opposite, the overall experience is precisely what is relevant.

It's exactly what I expected from an Apple product. That's why I was never enthusiastic about this hardware to begin with: I knew anything I would want to do with it would be arbitrarily impossible. That's Apple's business model. Just because I'm not the target audience doesn't mean I don't exist!

The target audience is anyone who is willing to pay $3500 for a walled garden. For fucks sake, I'm allowed to be critical of that business model.

You’re allowed to be anything you want, it’s just a predictable, well-trod take.

It’s no different than the people who show up in new iPhone announcement threads complaining about iOS and the App Store. We’ve heard all this before literally all the time — Google sells Pixels go buy one of those and be happy. Some of us like what Apple does with their ecosystem.

What isn't it allowed to do?

Anything outside the App Store.

What normal VR things can’t you do? Gaming is the obvious one but I think as soon as people start developing games for the vision App Store, that problem is going to resolve itself.

Like it love it or hate it, but this is what Apple does.

They sell premium hardware with a walled garden of software that meets the full expectations of 80% of people in general and 90-95% of people who can afford these devices.

For their target audience, $3000-3500 is probably the perfect the price point for the “first” generation of a new (to them) tech platform. Insofar as it allows them to turn a profit, ship best in class mass-manufacturable hardware, and not price out their core demographic of new adopters.

Pretty much. Under Tim Cook, Apple has become the greediest corporation ever, for products that are just about competitive with the overall technology market. But since they have fanboys that created some sort of cult they can get away with absurdity.

I have been an Apple customer since the first iPod but nowadays their pricing makes absolutely no sense considering their products' positioning compared to the rest of the market.

But somehow you cannot say that and you will be gaslighted about Apple pricing that always have been this way (even though it is demonstrably and factually not true).

At least for the iPhone there was a good excuse: network operators were not very keen on letting a completely open device run on their network, and still today there are limitations on what you can do with a fully rooted Android device. It somewhat makes sense; the nefarious potential is pretty big.

But for a headset? No reason at all to have it locked down from the get go.