Apple sold the Vision Pro as the future of computing, a spatial canvas where work, entertainment, and memory would collide in midair.
Six months in, the most honest review comes from the App Store itself, where the shelves look increasingly bare.
Developers who rushed to build for the headset are quietly walking away.
A number of high-profile native apps have stopped receiving updates, and several studios have confirmed they are pausing spatial projects indefinitely.
The math is brutal: a device that sold in modest numbers cannot justify the engineering hours required to rebuild an app for a platform with no proven audience.
Walk through the current catalog and the pattern is hard to miss.
What remains is a graveyard of tech demos, ported iPad apps stretched across your field of view, and a handful of video players.
The immersive experiences that justified the price tag at launch are now months old, with little new to replace them.
This is the classic chicken-and-egg trap that has killed every ambitious platform before it.
Users won't buy a $3,500 device without killer apps.
Developers won't build killer apps for a device nobody owns.
Apple's answer so far has been to lean on its own software and Hollywood partnerships, but a platform cannot survive on first-party content alone.
The human cost lands on early adopters, the people who believed the pitch and paid full price.
They are left with a beautifully engineered paperweight whose best feature is watching a movie alone on a virtual screen.
That is an expensive pair of goggles with a subscription to nothing.
Compare this to the iPhone's early days, when the App Store exploded within a year of launch.
Almost no one can casually buy a Vision Pro, and the developers know it.
There is a version of this story where Apple cuts the price, ships a lighter model, and the ecosystem finally catches fire.
But that version requires patience most consumers do not have and capital most indie developers cannot spare.
Until then, the headset's app problem is not a bug.
The lesson here is older than Silicon Valley: hardware without software is just sculpture.
Apple built a stunning machine and forgot that people buy machines to do things.
Final Thoughts
Until the apps arrive, that $3,500 buys a glimpse of a future that has not shown up for work yet.