> Are you going to buy one? I'm certainly not.
Probably not. And I say that while having the first commercial Oculus Rift, a HTC Vive and a Quest 2.
However, that's not important. When Apple does something, people pay attention. If Apple invests in and releases a product, you know other companies will follow. Companies will be scared and won't want to miss the boat. Samsung will release a design that will be cheaper and look mostly the same. Other manufacturers will try to come up with their own spin on things. All of a sudden, you have a battleground.
Think about this: Meta is hemorrhaging cash. They would be widly profitable but are in the red because of VR investments. Apple has plenty of cash (although stock has taken a beating with the rest of the market) and is also dedicating tons of R&D. What are they seeing that we are not seeing?
This is the exact sort of thinking that got the Soviet shuttle (the Buran). "The Americans wouldn't be crazy enough to build a spaceship as big as the shuttle for no reason, would they? They must have a pretty good reason we are not seeing, so let's build our own and figure out later." It does not have to be true. Maybe Meta and Apple are way off the mark and high on fumes from Milpitas. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter.
If the worst problem we can think of about this tech is how much it costs, that won't be a problem for much longer. It never is. It may take some time, but it will happen. We forget how much precision is required to make a CPU, an old fashioned hard drive, or a modern display. They all cost millions of dollars not that long ago and had to drop by _several orders of magnitude_. A VR headset costing 3k has to drop to maybe a third of its price to reach cellphone prices. If you drop by one order of magnitude you get to Quest's levels (before the price hike).
We need killer apps and comfortable headsets that are accepted by society. That's it. They look dorky today, but so did bluetooth phones until Apple released theirs. Now, they are fashionable.