Apple sold the Vision Pro as the future of computing.
Six months in, the headset's app store tells a different story.
A recent survey of early buyers found that most use the device for the same three things: watching movies, mirroring their Mac screen, and staring at spatial photos of their kids.
Everything else, the apps that were supposed to justify a mortgage payment, sits largely untouched.
The numbers are grim for anyone who bet on this thing.
Developers who rushed to build for visionOS describe a gold rush that never materialized.
One indie studio told me its Vision Pro app pulled in less than two percent of what the same title earned on iPhone.
When building for a platform costs six figures and the audience is a rounding error, the math stops working.
Spatial productivity suites, virtual coworking spaces, immersive fitness apps, all launched with press releases and quietly stopped updating.
A few big names still ship visionOS versions, but mostly as marketing checkboxes.
The ecosystem looks less like the next iPhone and more like the Apple Watch's first year, minus the eventual recovery.
The human cost lands on regular people who bought the pitch.
A father in Ohio told a forum he dropped $4,000 on the headset plus accessories so his family could "experience the future together." His kids used it twice.
Now it sits in a closet, a monument to a promise that the software never kept.
Multiply that story by thousands and you get a quiet consumer revolt.
This is what happens when a company sells hardware before it has a reason to exist.
Apple is brilliant at creating desire, but desire without utility curdles into resentment.
It needs a killer app that makes people forget the price.
So far, nobody has built one, and the developers who might have are walking away.
There's a broader sickness here that goes beyond one gadget.
American consumers keep getting sold "the future" in a box, then left to figure out what to do with it.
We are told to be early adopters, to trust the roadmap, to wait for the ecosystem to mature.
Meanwhile, the return window closes and the credit card bill arrives.
The Vision Pro's app drought is a warning shot for the entire tech industry.
You cannot engineer a platform into existence just by willing it.
Apps come from developers chasing users, and users come from apps worth using.
Break that loop and you get a very expensive paperweight.
Apple has the resources to fix this, but it needs to stop pretending the problem doesn't exist.
Maybe the headset survives as a niche luxury, the way some products do.
Maybe a future version finally cracks it.
But right now, the honest verdict is uncomfortable: the most advanced consumer device of the decade is also one of the least useful.
Final Thoughts
That should bother all of us, not just the people who already paid for it.