I said it on the day they first announced it, as soon as the media hype was over, no one would ever mention it again.
Other than price, not sure what else they could do to make it appealing.
To me the problem with the Vision line is it doesn't give any compelling reason to want it now or in the imminent future, even if it were priced similarly to lower end headsets, to really drive large numbers of sales on yet another VR walled garden. There is no killer app you'll spend hundreds of hours in, it's not going to actually replace/upgrade using your traditional apps, VR gaming is already relatively niche in established and open marketplaces but this has a brand new walled garden marketplace, and it offers nothing particularly "revolutionary" people haven't been promised 100 times about VR/AR to be disappointed with already. If it offered something meaningful against all of these points then it'd still sell decent numbers even at $3,500 but the problem is it's just lame despite being so high end.
In 2022 the US median personal income was $47,000. That's pre tax. Consider approximations with averages and marginal tax rates and take out 12% for tax, and you have $3445 per month median personal income.
The apple headset is $3500.
Take out average rent of $1350. Average credit card debt per consumer is just over $6300 in 2024, which seems high, but is also nearly twice monthly post tax income (holy crap). Average car payment for used vehicles is just over $500. I've not discussed food or utilities.
Given the above are for the average consumer, I'm not at all surprised a luxury and discretionary niche item such as the AVP has had next to no sales.
The problem isn't that the price of this particular VR headset was too high for average people to hope to afford it's that there is no compelling reasons for average people to buy VR headsets like this in the first place. Particularly when that company is just entering the market. Put another way: Even if a person were given a Vision Pro for free at launch I doubt they would have spent 100 hours in it by now. Is that not at least worth mentioning instead of just deferring to price when talking about why nobody wants it?
And, again, if the headset were targeted towards the budget market there is still no reason to expect it would have sold particularly well. E.g. there is a cheaper (~$550) but similar headset from an already established VR company with a lot more compelling a marketplace/ecosystem for an already existing line of products. They're (Meta, Quest 3) in the same ballpark with total revenue and less than a million units on their latest headset in a similar time period despite all these advantages and having the "right" price.
Your statement that 8m units were sold followed later by a statement that it would have not sold well in the budget market is also contradictory.
I stand by my claim that the cost is the main issue, because when you're playing a volume sales game in a small market and you're significantly more expensive than the competition, and your product is a purely luxury / discretionary purpose, you're probably screwed up your market segmentation and product placement.
I have the Xreal Airs. They run $300 for a 1080p screen. Apples screen is much better, but not 10x better.
Apple really needed to come in the $1k price range for this to be viable.
Again I'm not saying the high price was the optimal value, I'm saying the high price is far from the whole story on why the device didn't sell well and that a downmarket version still would not have sold well, even compared to existing peers in the lower cost space.