Apple's Vision Pro has been on the market for over a year now, and the app story tells you everything you need to know about where this is heading.
The headset launched with a wave of hype, a handful of impressive demos, and a promise that developers would build the future on top of it.
Walk through the app store on Vision Pro today and you'll find a lot of what you'd expect: streaming apps that mostly mirror what you can already watch on a TV, a few spatial games, some meditation and productivity tools.
What you won't find is the thing Apple sold everyone on—a reason to strap a computer to your face every day.
Estimates suggest the device has sold somewhere in the range of a few hundred thousand units since launch.
That's not nothing, but it's a fraction of what Apple's other product lines move in a single quarter.
Developers go where the users are, and the users aren't here.
The apps that do exist tend to fall into two buckets.
There are the "wow" demos—immersive videos, dinosaur encounters, virtual movie theaters—that impress for fifteen minutes and then get deleted.
And there are the productivity apps that let you float a few browser windows in space, which is genuinely useful until you realize a laptop does the same job for a tenth of the price without making your face sweat.
The group chats, the quick photo edits, the dumb little games you play on the couch.
Vision Pro apps are almost universally "experiences," and experiences are exhausting.
Nobody wants to have an experience every time they check their email.
You put it on, and the room disappears—or rather, Apple's cameras try very hard to make it look like the room hasn't disappeared, with mixed results.
Either way, you're cut off from the people around you.
In a country already dealing with an epidemic of loneliness, a $3,500 device that walls you off from your own living room is a tough sell.
The company has reportedly been rethinking its approach, with rumors of a cheaper model and a pivot toward tethered experiences that lean on your iPhone or Mac.
That's an admission that the standalone spatial computer dream isn't working yet.
It's also probably the right call, even if it feels like a step backward.
For now, the Vision Pro remains a fascinating piece of hardware with a software problem it can't seem to solve.
The apps aren't bad—there just aren't enough of them, and the ones that exist don't give anyone a reason to keep coming back.
Until that changes, it's a developer kit with a consumer price tag.
The real question isn't whether Apple can build a better headset.
It's whether anyone actually wants to live in one.
Final Thoughts
So far, the answer looks like no—and no amount of spatial computing polish is going to fix a problem that's really about human connection.