Apple's Vision Pro launched with all the fanfare of a moon landing and roughly the same number of people who could actually afford to watch it.
Six months later, the headset's app library is finally crawling out of the "glorified iPad strapped to your face" phase, and some of the new arrivals are genuinely weird in the best way.
Take the spatial video editors that let you scrub through 3D footage by pinching the air like a deranged orchestra conductor.
Or the meditation apps that drop you into a virtual canyon where a soothing voice reminds you that you spent more on this headset than your first car.
There's even a growing genre of "productivity" tools that are basically just floating monitors, which is a fancy way of saying you paid four figures to work in a spreadsheet with extra steps.
Developers have figured out that hand tracking plus a $3,500 device equals a small but rabid audience willing to pay for experiences you literally cannot get anywhere else.
One standout lets you build virtual Rube Goldberg machines with your bare hands, which sounds adorable until you realize you've been stacking digital dominoes for three hours while your dinner gets cold.
Is any of this enough to justify the price tag?
The Vision Pro is a developer kit wearing a consumer product's trench coat, and the apps arriving now are the first real proof that somebody, somewhere, has a vision beyond "what if your email was in the sky." The bigger question is whether any of this trickles down to the rest of us.
Apple's rumored cheaper headset—the one that won't require a second mortgage—could inherit this entire app ecosystem overnight.
Not that you'll buy a Vision Pro, but that you'll buy whatever comes next because the software finally stopped being embarrassing.
For now, the headset remains a rich person's science project.
A very cool, very expensive science project that occasionally lets you pet a virtual dinosaur.
Which, honestly, is more than most gadgets manage.
The Vision Pro app store is evolving from a ghost town into a weird little frontier town, and that's genuinely more interesting than another slightly thinner iPhone.
If you've got the disposable income and a high tolerance for looking ridiculous in front of your family, the timing is finally getting less terrible.
Final Thoughts
Everyone else can wait for the sequel—and honestly, you should.