Apple may charge a premium for their devices but they are not stupid otherwise the iPhone would cost far more than it does now. I can almost guarantee that they knew that this would not be a mainstream device and it was them getting their feet wet while the technology catches up to the software.
Maybe they even look at their success with the Apple Watch. When it first came out it was basically positioned as completely different device than it is now where most of the focus is on health with notifications being secondary. So get something out there and learn what people actually want.
Some of the work on the Vision Pro will have an impact on other devices and other way around.
Apple is clearly playing the long game here and maybe it will work, maybe it won't. But there is zero chance that they are abandoning it a year in. And unlike the original Apple Watch, the Vision Pro has a decent amount of compute in it to handle future updates even if a new version does come out.
Secondly, Apple support among the Apple developer community surveys is at lowest since the iPhone came to be, they won't get too much community support targeting Vision Pro as development platform, unless they change their hubris towards the development community.
They are where they are, and not yet another footnote in the company giants that went down burning, because the development community support in first place, when it was uncertainy how many pennies were left in Curpertino's account.
At the end of this year, or early next, Apple may produce and ship a spec bump for the Vision Pro, call it v1.1 or 1.5. Then, about a year later, if all goes well, Apple will ship a "not-Pro" version that is expected to cut premium materials, the external display, and drop the optical stack down to something more like Quest's. Combined with a cut in Apple's margin, they should be able to get the price down to about $2,000, $1,999 to conform with Apple's pricing style guide. Then, about a year after that, if Apple's still pushing forward, they will likely ship the follow-up Vision Pro, call it v2.
So, expect the Vision Pro 2 to arrive in late 2027 or early 2028. That's about a 4 year gap, closer to 5 years from the announcement.
You can call that nay-saying, I call it analysis.
Some of those things can be improved but inherently strapping a computer to your face is just not a great experience.
I definetly get use out of mine - I’d say 5 hour a week is a sweet spot - and it’s cool working in novel places like a garden or by a river, but full time doesn’t seem feasible
So if your use case is cool 3D movies you might be out of luck, but desktop mirroring should work at least 3+ years.
I suppose we'll have to wait and see.
I think it'll be more like Newton, they'll push hard for a couple of years to make it acceptable and when demand fails to materialize (at Apple scale) they will spike the project and say, like with Newton, as Jobs did, that "to realize their ambitious plans, they needed to concentrate all efforts in one direction"a probably AI or whatever the next big bubble happens to be about.
$3k is a ton of money in some cases, but over 3 years it's $20 a week. It doesn't have to be all that great to be worth $20 a week.
(What I really want is MacOS windows surrounding me, taking up way more visual real estate than even a large monitor. I'm sure that's a lot harder but it seems maybe possible since the device can tell where I'm looking.)