Ask HN: What Happened to the Apple Vision Pro?
The Apple Vision Pro was released just two years ago but somehow I completely forgot about it, does anyone still use it for anything?
I've never had the chance to try one but I do remember many people referring to it as a revolutionary piece of technology.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36201593
It's a clunky, heavy, $3500 nerd-alert flight helmet with a googly-eyes-of-doom projector up front. It has like four apps and two uses cases, one of which is "luxury paperweight". They're still trying to find the other one.
To buy (and keep) one, you have to be rich enough that a couple months' rent is nothing, self-confident (or socially oblivious) enough that you don't mind looking like a Star Wars droid knock-off, and masochistic enough to want to take your neck to the gym every time you want to watch a movie. Not a very big target audience...
It's too heavy and limited to be a useful personal screen. It's useless for gaming. It's too expensive to be an occasional-use-only device. It's a solution to a problem nobody had, and it solves none of the problems people do have. Sure, it had a lot of fancy tech, and maybe made sense as a laboratory prototype, but not a consumer device. You can do more with the $300 Facebook goggles for 10% of the price, or get one of the pricier but slimmer AR glasses (Xreal, etc.)
I like your comment and framing, I think it highlights a lot of salient points about the device. But to be fair similar-style criticisms were levied against the iPhone (right down to price point, nerd-factor, lack of physical keyboard etc). So it's important to see the promise in things too.
> $3500
> rich enough that a couple months’ rent is nothing
I largely agree, but I would like to know where rent is $1750/month,
I live in a low cost of living state and my rent is $3000
Have you ever wondered where the people who make less than $70k/year live?
$3000 for what? That seems high outside of in-demand urban areas. In the rural parts of Oregon and California where I've lived, $2000 would get you a nice house with 2 or 3 bedrooms, and $1750 would get you a studio or 1 bedroom pretty easily. It just depends.
As a single dude, I don't think I've ever paid $3000 for rent, anywhere I've lived, urban or rural. I think $2200 was the max and that was for a nicer short term rental.
Some figures: https://www.apartments.com/rent-market-trends/us/
I own one, but it lacks apps. Apple urgently needs to incentivize developers to create apps for the platform, and not just repackaged iPad apps.
We should have immersive games and experiences. In fact, even the intro immersive experience bundled with the Meta Quest has a greater wow factor than most Vision apps.
I bought it to use for its Mac Virtual Display functionality and it was OK, then it released the ultrawide option and it was wonderful. Still use it almost daily.
> I've never had the chance to try one
Definitely book a demo even if you decided you are not going to get one.
The other comments aren't surprising.
They released new hardware,but it really didn't differentiate itself in features or pricing from the existing market. There was no revolutionary use case to drive it forward. Existing competitors, such as HoloLens, already locked up the corporate market for things like maintenence spec or blueprint overlays. With a price point that is too high for mass consumer adoption, it's no surprise it flopped in the retail market too. Basically, the easiest answer for what happened to Apple Vision Pro is to just look up what happened to HoloLens. It's the same basic story, just a decade in advance.
I was in an empty Apple store the other day and thought about asking for a demo since they have them set up, but then I realized it could blow my mind and I'd still never spend $3,500 on a heavy head-worn computer that is limited like iOS.
The people still using the AVP that I know of are using it to watch movies and use it as virtual displays for their Macs.
Revolutionary technology I think needs to be something that gets across that early adopter chasm. We haven't really seen any 3D or goggle tech do that. There are VR things but I wouldn't consider VR video games a mainstream set of people. Mainstream to me is smartphones, AI usage, etc. things that catch on with the majority of the population.
I think that anything that is going to require humans to wear something on their head for entertainment purposes is not going to make it to mainstream. There will be niche uses and likely video games are a good niche. What is going to compel people to buy something like the Vision Pro when they already have smart phones that can do everything anyways?
Also, humans over 40 tend to start needing reading glasses and with each year of age more and more people need them. Its hard to have any device that covers the eyes also take into account people's vision issues, minor or major.
I think the issue is that vision is among the least important parts of virtual reality…an idea Ralph Koster describes here
https://youtu.be/kgw8RLHv1j4?si=-4Grus0FYlBJ6Fnl
And as a result, when X-was-done-using-Vision-Pro, inevitably the headline “x was done with Vision Pro”. The headline will not be about doing a-previously-undoable-x.
Vision Pro does not facilitate teamwork and teamwork is how approximately all important things get done. Not solipsistically. I mean visualize a conversation through Vision Pro versus one using Facetime or zoom. You lose most non-verbal communication if you leave the goggles on.
Zoom and Facetime and even POTS and faxes are what successful virtual reality looks like, they collapse real space — collapse distances —- between people.
See https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/apple-vision-pro/#apple-vi... for some coverage. While impressive technology, it kind of flopped, but Apple is ploughing on.
Imo the execution was a disaster. As it stands it's a pretty useless device because of the lack of controllers... I work with a company who builds interactive educational experiences in VR and even they can't use it because it can't do basic things like accurately keep track of hand positioning or gestures (beyond pitch).
Really the only use case for it is as a media device, but the price is way too high to buy it for that alone.
If the hope was that businesses and developers were going to buy one and start developing an ecosystem around it then they probably should have made it more than a glorified 3D TV, or made it much cheaper so it was more widely accessible.
I hear there's rumours they're going to add handsets soon though, so if they can do that while also bringing the price down a little that might help adoption a bit.
I just got my first one and love everything about it. Don’t understand the lack of uptake.
I can give you 3,500 reasons for the lack of uptake
They're still available. Check tomorrow during WWDC's keynote, there might be an update:
https://developer.apple.com/wwdc25/
Ah yeah I see they are still being sold online, I thought they were discontinued
They stopped production half a year ago because they have enough back-stock to last until the next hardware update, rumored for either later this year or 2026.
Shocks me they never even attempted to lower the price, especially given the flop and reported excess stock on hand.
They even lowered the original iPhone price to help it succeed in the market.