Why Apple's Vision Pro is stuck in neutral
- The Apple Vision Pro has been out for six months.
- We're still waiting for a killer app for the $3,500 headset.
Did you know that Apple Vision Pro has been on sale for more than six months?
It's OK. I forgot too.
That's because the consensus that formed fairly quickly after the device got into the hands of regular people — not Apple-approved influencers and critics — seems to have held up: Very cool tech! Don't really know what to do with it.
Maybe you could change that consensus with a killer app, or even some apps that aren't totally killer but at least suggest practical reasons to plunk down a minimum of $3,500 for the headset.
Back in April, we noted that those apps didn't seem to exist.
Now, investor and analyst Matthew Ball, who's taking stock of the device now that it's been out for half a year, takes another look at the Apple Vision Pro app selection and finds… the same thing.
More worrisome: Developers have had their hands on this device for more than a year. There ought to be something wowing people by now, right? Ball writes:
Apple's positioning around the Vision Pro (I've asked them for comment, but they have yet to respond to any of my queries about the device this year, so I'm not counting on one today) is that they are in this for the long haul. And they're not going to worry about what the haters say. And where we're going, we don't need roads.
But at some point there's the danger of a fully-baked vicious cycle here: No awesome apps means people don't buy the device, which means there isn't a market that's worth a developer's time, which means there's no incentive to make awesome apps. I'm not sure how they solve this one.