Apple sold the Vision Pro as the future of computing.
Eighteen months in, the app store for it feels less like a frontier and more like a ghost town with good lighting.
Walk through the Vision Pro's ecosystem and a pattern emerges.
The marquee apps are mostly ports of things you already own on your phone: a floating browser, a giant screen for streaming, a spatial photo viewer you'll open twice.
The native experiences that justify a $3,500 purchase remain stubbornly rare.
For every genuinely clever spatial app, there are dozens of thin wrappers that amount to a rectangle hovering in space.
It's a window into how American consumers get sold a future that hasn't been built yet.
We are asked to pay now for the promise of later, and "later" keeps getting pushed back while the return window closes.
Building for a headset with a small user base is a brutal business calculation.
Why spend six months crafting a spatial experience for a few hundred thousand owners when the same effort on iPhone reaches billions?
The math is unforgiving, and it quietly strangles the platform's potential.
Apple's own tools are elegant, but elegance doesn't pay rent.
The result is a feedback loop that should worry anyone who cares about where tech is heading.
Apple can subsidize this longer than most, but even deep pockets have limits, and the company has already shuffled its spatial computing priorities in ways that suggest internal doubt.
Meanwhile, the culture of "buy the first version" keeps winning.
Influencers unbox the headset, film the wow moment, and move on.
The device ends up on a shelf next to the smart speaker that was going to run your home and the VR rig from three years ago.
We keep mistaking novelty for utility, and companies keep letting us.
What's genuinely frustrating is that the Vision Pro does some things beautifully.
Watching a movie on a screen the size of a wall, with spatial audio that actually tracks your head, is a real experience.
The problem is that real experiences don't scale into an ecosystem.
You can't build a platform on "you have to try it." Compare this to the iPhone's early days.
The App Store launched with 500 apps and a clear path for developers to make money.
The Vision Pro launched into a market where the killer app might not exist yet, and nobody's sure it ever will.
That's a far riskier bet for everyone involved.
Treat it like the first-generation product it is.
If you have the disposable income and genuine curiosity, fine.
But if you're waiting for the flood of must-have spatial apps that justify the price, you may be waiting a long while.
The uncomfortable truth is that we've been here before, with 3D TVs and smart glasses and a dozen other "next big things" that never crossed the chasm from demo to daily life.
But right now it's asking consumers to fund a bet that even its maker seems unsure about.
Our take: a platform lives or dies on what you can actually do with it, not on what a keynote promised.
Final Thoughts
Until the Vision Pro has apps people open every single day, it's an expensive demo, and American shoppers deserve to hear that before they swipe their cards.