When Apple launched the Vision Pro, the pitch was simple: this isn't a gadget, it's a new platform.
The apps would come, the ecosystem would bloom, and the $3,499 headset would quietly become the future of computing.
Nearly a year later, the App Store for visionOS tells a different story.
Browse the headset's storefront and you'll find a graveyard of abandoned experiments.
Plenty of apps were built for launch week, hyped in a keynote, and never touched again.
A meditation app here, a spatial photo viewer there, and a handful of streaming services that mostly just mirror what you already watch on your TV.
The apps that genuinely need a headset are rare.
The apps that justify the price are rarer still.
This is the quiet crisis of the Vision Pro: it's a beautiful piece of hardware with almost nothing urgent to do.
Your phone has a thousand apps that solve real problems.
The headset has a few dozen that solve problems you didn't know you had.
Watching a movie on a virtual screen is impressive for about twenty minutes.
Then you remember you own a couch and a television.
When a device sells in the low hundreds of thousands rather than the hundreds of millions, building for it is a hobby, not a business.
Apple's own silence on updated sales figures speaks volumes.
A platform without scale can't attract the studios, health companies, and productivity giants that would make the headset feel essential.
The result is a device that's socially isolating in a way Apple never intended.
You strap it on, and you're alone in a digital room.
There's no shared screen, no communal moment, no reason to gather.
Compare that to the iPhone, which became the thing families argue over at dinner.
The Vision Pro doesn't create friction because it doesn't create connection.
For American buyers, this matters more than the spec sheet.
We're already drowning in subscription apps we forget to cancel and gadgets that end up in drawers.
The Vision Pro risks becoming the most expensive drawer occupant in tech history.
Apple keeps promising the ecosystem will mature, but maturity requires users, and users require reasons, and reasons require apps that do something a laptop can't.
A few spatial computing tools for designers and 3D artists show real promise.
Some enterprise training apps hint at a future where the headset earns its keep at work rather than on the couch.
The uncomfortable truth is that Apple may have built the hardware before the culture was ready to use it.
We don't yet know what we'd want a headset to do all day, and until we do, developers will keep building demos instead of necessities.
It's a warning about how we buy technology now: on faith, on hype, and on the assumption that the apps will surely arrive.
Sometimes they don't. **The bottom line:** A platform is only as valuable as what you can actually do with it, and right now the Vision Pro asks you to pay a premium for potential.
Final Thoughts
Until the apps show up, that's a lot of money for a promise.