Why on Earth can people return these for non-fault reasons?!
It's the other customers who bear the cost to cover this - like indecisive ditzy clothes shoppers who order huge numbers of items knowing they'll return 90% of them.
I suspect in the US it's more lax but the whole caveat emptor thing is out the window if you can arbitrarily return things - for worn products they won't even be directly resellable.
The in-person demo of the Vision Pro in the Apple Store is scripted to a few actions and apps that the user is allowed to open under supervision, and nothing else.
E.g. you should not open a website of your choice in Safari.
Apple staff said "we cannot tell you what the device can or cannot do, and we are not allowed to let you try it it out here in the Apple Store; you need to first buy it and try it out at home. If you find it cannot do what you want, you can return it."
With this approach, it makes sense that all returns are accepted.
"Even for a technological tour de force, 5K is a lot of dough. If I used it, and loved it, I’d keep it. But for discomfort, actual eye pain, looking through a periscope, and the inevitable resulting gathering-dust-in-a-corner? I’m not insane. It has to go back. I’m an early adopter, but not a throw-away-5-kilodollars early adopter."
Not all problems become evident in a carefully-curated demo at a well-lit store, either.
Or, another way to put it, if it's so certainly causing a loss other customers have to bear why would the company promote the return policy and lose out on that margin from paying customers?
Second, because it's a $5000 thing that was not clearly advertised and was over-marketed to the point where people are disappointed because it's not the magic they were sold. I feel like they'd have sold 0 of them if they didn't offer easy fast refunds.
Besides, you could buy your Apple products from Amazon instead and get ..I think it's 30?
You act like this is taking money out of others' wallet- imagine how much money shoppers would lose if they had no recourse when a product didn't perform as expected. It doesn't need to be broken to be disappointing, and returns are one of the few tools consumers have to protect themselves from companies that oversell and under-deliver.