Apple's focus on productivity is good too because it relies less on network effects for cool use cases. Part of why the Meta approach is hard is the social stuff requires everyone you know to have headsets, this (imo) is why Carmack was pushing for lighter, cheaper devices over the Meta Quest Pro - he saw growth and distribution as the core bottleneck for Meta's approach.
Since Apple's approach is around individual use and productivity, that frees them to build an expensive device that provides value to one user and then leverage that until lots of people have them, it's an easier way to bootstrap (and something they've done historically repeatedly). Of course it helps they already have a platform to extend too.
The big breakthrough IMO is commitment to pass-through for AR, this ultimately solves the "draw black" problem Michael Abrash wrote about at Valve in 2012 [0] before he joined Oculus. Ben Thompson of Stratechery makes an analogy to mirrorless cameras vs. DSLRs and I think it fits - people thought screens would never be good enough compared to natural light, but it turns out at some point they are. Palmer Luckey mentioned in 2021 that he thought this also should be the approach to it. The other major issue Abrash talks about in that blog post is latency, and Apple has solved this (though only just) because of their incredible custom silicon which was not easily visible back in 2012.
It's possible to imagine these devices getting smaller and lighter as they iterate, the AR and eye tracking means you may be able to do things like look at a light switch in your house and turn it out without anything else, UI for the real world becomes possible. Looking at little glass displays could become an anachronism of this time. Of course, it could also just be a common way to do desktop computing - hard to know.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120804140946/http://blogs.valv...
It's fun to look back on some old HN threads with predictions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...