Apple sold the Vision Pro as the future of computing.
Six months in, the app store tells a different story.
The headset has plenty of impressive demos and a handful of genuinely useful tools, but the everyday reasons to strap a computer to your face remain stubbornly thin.
For a device that costs more than a used car, "thin" is a problem.
Walk through the Vision Pro's app catalog and you notice a pattern.
The best experiences are the ones that make you forget you're wearing a headset at all.
A handful of productivity apps let you pin massive virtual monitors in the air, and for remote workers juggling spreadsheets, that alone can justify the price of admission.
Streaming apps deliver a genuinely cinematic screen that makes a hotel TV feel like a punishment.
Ported iPad apps float in space looking exactly like ported iPad apps, which is to say pointless.
A wave of novelty games and "immersive experiences" rack up five-star reviews from early adopters and then sit unopened.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who lived through the first wave of smartwatches: lots of experimentation, very little you'd miss if it vanished.
The deeper issue is social, not technical.
Every Vision Pro app asks you to check out of the room you're physically in.
Wear it in a meeting and you get a reputation.
Americans already spend hours a day hunched over phones, and the headset doubles down on the same isolation with more expensive hardware.
The apps that succeed will be the ones that solve a real problem instead of inventing a new way to disappear.
Why spend months building for a device with a small install base when the same effort reaches millions on a phone?
Apple's answer is that the platform needs time.
That's a fair point, and it's also exactly what companies say right before a product quietly becomes a niche curiosity.
The displays are astonishing, the eye tracking feels like magic, and the spatial video of your own family is legitimately moving.
And right now the Vision Pro is a spectacular theater with a very short playbill.
The verdict for most Americans is simple: this is a developer kit wearing a consumer price tag.
If you have a specific professional use and money to burn, the monitor-replacement apps might earn their keep.
The apps that would make this thing essential don't exist yet, and no amount of hype can conjure them overnight.
We've seen this movie before with the Apple Watch, and it took years and a pivot toward health to find its footing.
Final Thoughts
But until a killer app arrives that does something your laptop genuinely cannot, you're paying a premium to be a beta tester.