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...and get none of the benefits of it.

This is like saying "for the price of car, you could buy 20,000 bicycles". While that's true, I'm not going to ride my bike from Texas to Disneyland.

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The point is not to get the “benefits” of a VR headset, but rather to maximise one’s chances of doing something interesting without a VR headset.

I would not suggest getting all of them anyway. It’s just to observe that the opportunity cost of disappearing inside an expensive virtual device is matched by the financial cost.

One gadget is the equivalent of the outlay of an entire well-funded hobby that might broaden your horizons.

What's to say (and who are you to say) that a VR headset may not broaden someone's horizons, though?

I had the unfortunate experience of trying the metaverse. It was vile to the point I logged out and returned the headset. Maybe Apple will offer a better alternative. The experience is nothing like real life, where a few bad people are usually limited in their verbal assaults. Also you wouldn’t generally have exposure to such indecent behavior generally in real life.

There are plenty of ways someone could expand their horizons and develop a hobby in VR that doesn’t involve or require them to do any of that.

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