Apple sold the Vision Pro as the future of computing.
Six months in, the killer app is still missing, and the people who paid full price are starting to notice.
Walk through any Apple Store and you'll find the demo units humming along, showing off immersive dinosaur clips and floating safari panoramas.
What you won't find is a compelling reason to strap a ski goggles-shaped computer to your face every day.
The app catalog tells the story: a handful of genuinely impressive experiences surrounded by a graveyard of abandoned ports and gimmicks.
The numbers are grim for anyone who bought in early.
Developers who rushed to build for visionOS have quietly stopped updating their apps.
Netflix, YouTube, and Spotify — three apps Americans open more than almost anything else — still don't have native Vision Pro versions.
You can watch their content in a browser, technically, but that's not the seamless future Apple promised on stage.
Meanwhile, the apps that do exist skew toward novelty.
There's the meditation app that puts you in a virtual canyon.
There's the one that turns your living room into a Star Wars scene.
But nobody is reorganizing their life around a $3,500 device to watch a slightly better version of a screensaver.
What's happening here isn't just a slow start.
It's a warning sign about how Apple has approached this entire product.
The company built breathtaking hardware and then assumed the software ecosystem would follow out of sheer loyalty.
That worked for the iPhone because the iPhone arrived at a moment when nobody knew what a smartphone could be.
The Vision Pro arrived at a moment when everyone already knows what they want — and it isn't a headset that isolates them from the room.
There's a deeper unease running through this, too.
We've spent a decade watching screens colonize every corner of American life — the dinner table, the bedroom, the driver's seat.
The Vision Pro's pitch is essentially: what if the screen covered your entire field of vision?
Apple's marketing calls it "spatial computing." A less generous read is that it's the final step in a long march away from the people physically standing next to you.
Building for a platform requires believing people will actually use it.
Right now, the install base is small, the daily-use numbers are smaller, and the return on investment is unclear.
Every month that passes without a must-have app makes the next month harder, because talent and attention move on.
The gadget itself is remarkable engineering.
None of that matters if the software feels like a theme park with three open rides.
Apple has survived slow starts before — the Apple Watch was underwhelming at launch, and look at it now.
But the Watch was $400 and fit on a wrist people already owned.
The Vision Pro asks for a mortgage payment and a willingness to look strange in front of your family.
That's a much steeper trade, and so far the apps haven't justified it.
The uncomfortable truth is that the Vision Pro might not have an app problem at all.
Final Thoughts
It might have a purpose problem, and no amount of developer outreach can fix a device that hasn't answered the simplest question: why would anyone wear this on a Tuesday?