Apple sold the Vision Pro as the future of computing.
A year and a half later, the App Store for it looks like a ghost town, and the people who dropped four figures on one are starting to notice.
Walk through the numbers and the picture gets uncomfortable.
The headset launched with promises of a new app economy, developers racing to build for spatial computing, and a device that would eventually replace your laptop.
What actually arrived was a slow trickle of ports, a handful of genuinely interesting experiments, and a lot of abandoned projects that stopped getting updates months ago.
The apps that do exist fall into a few predictable buckets.
There are the streaming apps, which mostly amount to watching a movie on a virtual screen you could have watched on your TV.
There are the productivity apps, which ask you to type on a floating keyboard while wearing a battery pack on your hip.
And then there are the demos, the little five-minute experiences that impress your friends at a party and then never get opened again.
Developers are not hiding why they've stepped back.
Building for visionOS means learning new frameworks, testing on hardware most of them don't own, and targeting a user base that numbers in the hundreds of thousands rather than the billions of iPhone owners.
A studio that spends six months on a spatial app is competing for attention against a device that many buyers use a few times a week at most.
This is the same trap that swallowed earlier attempts at this category, and it's the part the tech press keeps glossing over.
Meta's headsets have sold far more units, and even they struggle to keep a vibrant software ecosystem alive.
Apple's answer so far has been to lean on its own first-party apps and a few high-profile partnerships, which keeps the store from looking completely empty but doesn't solve the underlying problem: nobody has found the thing you genuinely need a headset to do.
What's left is a familiar American story.
A company markets a premium product as revolutionary, early adopters pay a premium to be first, and then the ecosystem that was supposed to justify the price never quite shows up.
The next software update adds features nobody asked for while the app gap stays exactly where it was.
There's a real question about whether any of this gets fixed by brute force.
Apple has the cash to keep funding the platform for years, and it clearly intends to.
But cash can't manufacture developer enthusiasm, and it can't retroactively invent a use case that makes a $3,500 device feel like a necessity rather than a novelty.
The companies that build apps are not charities.
They go where the users are, and right now the users aren't here.
Until that changes, the Vision Pro will keep being what it is today: a beautiful piece of engineering with almost nothing to do on it.
The most telling thing about the Vision Pro isn't the hardware, which is genuinely impressive.
It's that a year in, the strongest argument for owning one is still the demo you give to friends who don't own one.
Final Thoughts
That's a party trick with a four-figure price tag.