Six months after launch, the $3,500 headset is developing a very American kind of crisis: plenty of horsepower, not much to do.
Apple's App Store for visionOS now hosts a few thousand titles, but a striking share are recycled iPad apps running in flat, floating windows.
The genuinely spatial experiences—the ones the keynote promised—remain a short list.
For a device pitched as the future of computing, the present feels oddly like a demo reel that never got a second act.
Walk through any office that owns one and you'll hear the same confession: it's incredible for watching movies on a plane, and then it sits in a drawer.
Productivity apps exist, but typing in air is slower than a keyboard, and few workplaces have rebuilt their workflows around a headset that makes you look like you're skiing indoors.
Meanwhile, developers face a brutal math problem.
Why spend months building for a user base measured in the hundreds of thousands when the same effort reaches a billion iPhones?
And fewer developers mean the early adopters, the ones who evangelize new hardware to everyone else, quietly stop recommending it.
It's a cultural one, and it's happening in living rooms across the country.
We've spent a decade watching screens colonize every corner of life—the dinner table, the bedroom, the driver's seat.
A headset that seals you off from the room entirely asks Americans to surrender something they're already ambivalent about: shared physical space.
The apps that would justify that trade-off, the ones that make isolation feel worth it, largely haven't arrived.
Spatial journaling, 3D anatomy tools, immersive concerts, and meditation apps that wrap you in a virtual canyon all exist.
They're also niche, and none has crossed into the mainstream conversation the way a single viral iPhone game once did.
The headset needs its Angry Birds moment.
So far, it's gotten a lot of beautifully rendered silence.
Apple's history suggests patience pays off.
The iPhone's App Store looked thin in 2008 too, before the gold rush hit.
But the iPhone solved a problem people already had.
The headset is still searching for one, and the longer that search drags on, the harder it becomes to convince anyone the answer is coming.
In the meantime, the most honest review of the Vision Pro may be the one nobody writes: it's a remarkable machine waiting for a reason.
Until that reason shows up, it's a very expensive answer to a question most Americans haven't asked. **Our take:** A platform lives or dies on what people can actually do with it, and right now the Vision Pro is rich in novelty and poor in necessity.
Apple has the resources to wait this out, but consumers shouldn't confuse potential with a finished product.
Final Thoughts
Buy it for what it does today, not for the future someone keeps promising.