When Apple unveiled the Vision Pro last year, the pitch was a future where screens dissolve into the air around you.
A year in, that future looks less like a revolution and more like an empty showroom.
A wave of developers who rushed to build for the headset are quietly walking away, and the apps they're leaving behind tell a story Apple would rather you not read.
The numbers are grim for anyone who spent mortgage money on this thing.
Analytics firms tracking the App Store have noted that new Vision Pro app releases have slowed to a trickle since launch, with many high-profile titles going months without updates.
Some studios that announced ambitious spatial projects have simply stopped talking about them.
The software ecosystem around it is thinning out.
Building for visionOS is expensive, the install base is tiny, and there's no money in it yet.
Developers go where users are, and users aren't here.
It's the same chicken-and-egg problem that killed dozens of niche platforms before, except this time the chicken costs as much as a used car.
For the people who did buy in, the practical result is a device that increasingly runs Apple's own first-party experiences and little else.
Watching a movie on a virtual mega-screen is genuinely impressive.
Browsing Safari in spatial tabs feels like science fiction.
But a platform can't survive on demos forever, and the third-party catalog that was supposed to make this thing indispensable is evaporating.
There's a broader unease here that goes beyond one product.
We've spent a decade letting tech companies convince us that buying into the newest category is a form of participation in the future.
Smart speakers, VR headsets, metaverse land, AI gadgets — each arrived with a promise of permanence that rarely survived contact with the market.
The Vision Pro is the most expensive example yet of a device sold as a doorway that turns out to be a dead end.
Apple isn't dumb, and it has a long history of patiently building platforms that look shaky early.
The iPhone's App Store was nearly empty in 2008.
But the iPhone cost $499 and fit in a pocket.
The Vision Pro costs seven times that and lives on your face.
Patience is a luxury customers pay for, and right now they're the ones footing the bill while the app shelves gather dust.
The uncomfortable truth is that we keep mistaking novelty for durability.
A gadget that dazzles in a demo can still be abandoned by the very ecosystem that was supposed to sustain it.
When that happens, the buyer isn't just out of money — they're left holding a promise nobody else showed up to keep.
If you're considering a Vision Pro today, the honest advice is to wait and watch whether the app gap closes or widens.
A platform is only as good as the people still willing to build on it.
Final Thoughts
Right now, too many of them are packing up.