Apple sold the Vision Pro as the future of computing, a device that would change how we work, play, and connect.
Six months in, the most honest thing anyone can say about it is that the headset is a spectacular piece of hardware in search of a reason to exist.
The apps, it turns out, were never really the point.
Walk through the Vision Pro's app store today and you'll notice something strange for a platform Apple promised would redefine everything: it's mostly ports. iPad apps floating in space like digital ghosts, repackaged with a little depth and a lot of empty air.
The companies that define how Americans actually spend their screen time looked at a $3,500 headset with a few hundred thousand owners and quietly decided it wasn't worth the engineering hours.
What's left is a museum of technical demos.
You can watch a dinosaur walk through your living room, and it's genuinely breathtaking for about ninety seconds.
You can pin Safari windows to your kitchen wall.
Each experience works beautifully and then sits there, waiting for you to find a reason to return.
The headset ends up in a drawer next to the Peloton.
This is the part the tech press rarely says out loud: a platform lives or dies on its developers, and developers follow users, and users follow usefulness.
Apple built a machine with no obvious job.
It isn't a better laptop, because you can't comfortably type on it for eight hours.
It isn't a better TV, because you have to strap it to your face.
It isn't a better phone, because you can't slip it into your pocket.
Every category it touches, it touches worse than the device you already own.
There's a meditation app that surrounds you with calming visuals.
There's a spatial video player for reliving family memories, which is genuinely moving the first time and slightly unsettling the fifth.
There are productivity tools that let you arrange windows in three-dimensional space, a feature that solves a problem nobody with a second monitor has ever had.
Meanwhile, the genuinely useful stuff, the kind of app that would make you reach for the headset every morning, hasn't arrived.
The App Store didn't even exist yet, and people still lined up because the core device was indispensable the moment you held it.
The hardware is astonishing and the use case is hypothetical.
Apple is asking customers to buy a promise, and promises don't hold resale value.
None of this means the technology is doomed.
Spatial computing may well be where screens go eventually, and someone has to build the awkward first version.
But Americans have watched this movie before with 3D televisions and smart glasses, and the ending is usually a clearance bin.
The companies that could make this platform matter are waiting on the sidelines, and they're not wrong to wait.
The Vision Pro isn't failing because the apps are bad.
It's failing because there's no app anyone actually needs.
Final Thoughts
Until a developer builds something you can't get anywhere else, this remains the most impressive gadget most people will never buy twice.