It is a technological tour de force and an amazing demo of what's possible and what is soon to come. But if we define a "good product" to mean a commercially successful one, then it isn't very successful. Still, I'm hoping it won't be killed and that it will continue to evolve and become successful eventually.

Thats a very naive understanding of success. Youre telling the soap maker on etsy doesnt have a successful product because she doesnt sell a million units a day? Youre telling me that Rolls Royce Aerospace isn't successful because they only 100 aircraft engines a year?

That soap maker didn't spend $10B in R&D figuring out how to make the soap. Your retort makes zero sense. Apple's worst products sold tens of millions of units in their first couple of years while Vision Pro sold about 370K units in year 1 and well into year 2 still has plenty of inventory sitting on warehouse shelves to cover all of 2025 demand. It literally bombed in the market. It's an abject failure of a product that couldn't be called a success in any way beyond a great prototype and some excellent demoware. It's a flop and a joke.

It didn’t bomb in the market. It was priced for supply constraints. They basically tied Meta on all headset revenue in its first year (450k units and $1.4 billion). visionOS is a triumph and foundation for the next decade of computing, and the entire product line of Apple is adapting to its look and feel. The entire XR / VR industry is changing their strategy to respond to visionOS , particularly Meta horizon OS which has incorporated numerous improvements that were directly inspired by Apple. And plenty of Apple products sold a lot less than 10 million annually to this day.

> It literally bombed in the market.

Compared to what?

> But if we define a "good product" to mean a commercially successful one

Why would we define a "good product" as a "successful product"? These are 2 different things. There are many ways to define a "good product" (is it useful? is it well made? is it innovative?), success is something else. All combinations of good-bad / successful-unsuccessful are possible.

Same reaction. The vision pro is clearly a great headset. The biggest thing restraining it has been the ability to program for it. If Apple will not let 3rd party devs access the primitives needed to create game engine support then Apple needs to lend that support. Here they are

The biggest thing restraining it is the ergonomics and form factor. No one wants face PCs. Imagine how women, who are half the population, and who spend 0.5T dollars a year on hair and makeup products, are going to deal with smashing a 1.5 pound PC into their faces and held in place with straps around their head and hair. SJ would have smothered that thing in the crib the second his team had no answer for how a product that excludes half the population at the get go could possibly be successful. Can you imagine iPhone shipping in a form factor that required women redo their hair and makeup after every single use?

I want a face PC, if it's a VisionPro; just can't afford one. My wife wants one more than I do. Two counter-examples for you there.

1. That's an anecdote, but you know that. I'm going to guess that the wife of someone on this forum is nerdier than average.

2. Even if you WANT a face PC, that doesn't mean you'll love using it and keep it once the honeymoon wears off. Supposedly over half of VR headset owners use their device less than once per month.

I used to want a headset. I bought a Valve Index. Everything about the device was fantastic. The games were fantastic. But then I sold it about 6 months later because, meh, it's just not something that was practical and usable frequently enough.

So right now we have basically ideal headsets Meta Quest 3/3S which are excellent, dirt cheap, lightweight, and have a large software catalog but they still struggle to retain users and grow the market.

The Vision Pro hasn't even resolved motion sickness for 100% of users. You can love it and still be forced to discontinue use one by something you can't control about your own body.

> So right now we have basically ideal headsets Meta Quest 3/3S

Cmon, it has shitty hardware and shittier software. The only thing going for it is price and a game catalogue they've basically purchased. Which is admittedly a formidable combo, but it's clear nobody wants it. There's no leverage to make them actually cater to the consumer.

I would say cost is the hardest part to swallow—hence why I think it's ludicrous to even vaguely suggest it's aimed at general consumers. But i suppose it's difficult to tease these things apart.

>* It's clearly far more impressive technologically than any competitor.

Technology hardly makes a product.

>The price point clearly indicates it wasn't aimed at the general consumer,

You don't put your CEO on the cover of Vanity Fair and devote half your retail space and staff to it if it's not for the general consumer.

>* They got loads of feedback

Not as much as they hoped. They hoped to have 500K units in the wild in the first year and ramp up for the second year to a meaningful production run but that never happened because demand fell off a cliff once the fanboys got theirs and so the feedback is very, very limited and mostly negative or untrustworthy.

>* Nobody who is this critical seems to articulate what success would have looked like.

Apple scale scales. Meet or break Watch's first 2 year sales maybe? Watch, derided as a failure in the first year actually sold about ~20M units across both year 1 and year 2. Vision Pro will sell fewer than 500K units across year 1 and 2. 500K units!! One doesn't need to define success when failure is so easily defined here.

>Even just streaming video back and forth is going to be too power-hungry for serious use with lightweight glasses.

Spectacles will be entirely different technology stacks. See the Meta Orion prototype for example. You are correct, battery is an issue. Even bigger though is heat. Can't let things get smartphone hot on your face or it's game over. Anyway, expect low-res, narrow field of view, 2D overlays, more like your car's HUD than the immersive experience of goggles. But at least spectacles have a chance where goggles clearly do not, as demonstrated at both the high end and low end by Apple and Meta.

They had about 450 K units in the wild in the first year. They will sell around 600 K units of the first version until the second one is released later this year. This was on a potential production target of 900 K units. So it’s not exactly a failure so much as an underperform due to them over pricing it for supply constraints.

VisionOS is clearly a triumph and the basis of UX for their entire product line. The scepticism is gonna age like those who were sceptical about the original Mac and Windows. Vision Pro isn’t even all that expensive by historical standards.

The Vision Pro could easily have been successful if they'd invested an additional 10% of it's R&D budget into software development, and released a suite of tools that actually leveraged what the platform was capable of.

It's incredibly impressive tech but just not worth it if all there is to do is to have ipad apps floating in the air around me.

It does a lot more than iPad apps. Coexisting 3-D volumetric apps with 2D app is quite innovative and not even an android XR will be able to do that in its first release. What’s software development tools do you think it’s missing?

Hey! They have 3D TV too! Didn't you want even more inconvenient 3D TV?

Honestly yes. It's by far the highest quality implementation of 3D TV or 3D Film I have ever viewed. Avatar 2 and IMAX films in particular are stupendous. I really don't have an adjective to describe how much better stereo content in the VisionPro is over every other display device or theater.

Exactly. 3D TV wasn’t a bad idea. It was just pushed a bit too hard too soon. There’s a reason 3D movies are still popular in theaters; people genuinely enjoy them and are willing to pay at least some premium for them.

Frankly, I’d much rather have a 3D TV than a “smart” TV.

The fact that the AVP gives you fully isolated video streams for each eye is what makes it kickass compared to any glasses-filtering based display. It's perfect stereo.

What sets it apart from things like Meta Quest is Apple's best-in-class video rental / stream / purchase infrastructure all going back to the original iTunes.

And then you have apps like Disney Plus that fully support it.

I assume the GP means "successful in the market" by "successful product". They're distinguishing between something that might be successful otherwise and something that is successful as a product.

I get that part entirely! It's the conflation of "good" and "successful" that I find confusing.

> Battery alone precludes this. Even just streaming video back and forth is going to be too power-hungry for serious use with lightweight glasses.

I know this is obvious, but the battery doesn't have to go in the glasses. When the glasses are just a wireless monitor, it opens up all sorts of possibilities for belttop computers. Obviously, the glasses still need some power, but the battery can be very small, comparatively. Put the weight and heat into something with a mobile phone form factor.

Apple Watch -> $250

iPhone 16 Pro Max -> $1200

iVirt -> $2400

iVirt LTE -> $3200

iGlass -> $600

Now you can charge $3000 for you VR kit, but claim it only costs $2400. Plus people shell out $600 for the glasses even though they don't have the CPU. They just want to look like they do. Or they buy multiple pairs for different locations or as backups or whatever. The profit on the glasses could be huge. Especially if they could replace the Apple Watch for some people.

Googling "belttop" just shows belts. To what are you referring? Are you suggesting wiring the glasses to some battery stored elsewhere? Sure you can do that, but I thought people these days hated wires (in spite of an objectively superior interface to wireless). But you certainly can't power streaming for it (for more than say an hour) with the battery you can actually store in glasses.

I've never even heard of an iVert.

> Plus people shell out $600 for the glasses

I want to sell these people a bridge. Pray tell me where I can find them because their money is absolutely begging to be taken for a pittance.

Oh this is definitely for rich people only. I thought that was a given. Who else spends $1200 on a laptop every two years? Who else spends $300 on a watch? We're looking for people who spend $200-500 on sunglasses--the non-electronic kind.

You ask where to find these people? Visit your closest Apple store. Or a rodeo arena. Or a Tesla charging lot. Or a Whole Foods market. The United States is crawling with these people.