Apple sold the Vision Pro as the future of computing, a spatial computer that would change how Americans work, watch, and live.
Six months in, the most honest thing you can say about it is that the apps are weird, thin, and strangely antisocial.
Walk into any Apple Store demo station and you'll see the same thing: a person wearing ski goggles, grinning at a dinosaur, while a specialist hovers nearby like a lifeguard.
The headset launched with roughly 600 native apps, a number Apple bragged about.
What it didn't mention is that most of those apps are ports of iPad apps floating in space.
If the world's biggest streaming companies looked at a $3,500 device with millions of potential customers and said "nah," that tells you something uncomfortable about where this is going.
Meanwhile, the genuinely inventive apps are getting strange.
There's one that lets you meditate inside a virtual forest while your heart rate syncs to the scenery.
Another turns your living room into a museum of extinct animals.
A third lets you relive a concert you never attended.
You put on the headset, and the rest of your household disappears.
Your spouse is sitting three feet away, and you have no idea.
Compare that to the iPhone, which connected us in ways that felt genuinely new, or even the AirPods, which quietly became the most social product Apple ever shipped.
It's a device for one person, in one room, doing one thing.
And the numbers are catching up to the vibe.
Reports suggest Apple has slashed production forecasts and quietly slowed work on the next generation.
Why spend months building for a platform where the user base is smaller than a mid-sized town's population?
Some of the most promising early apps have gone quiet.
Others have pivoted back to the iPad, where the money actually is.
The thing is, none of this is Apple's fault in the way you'd expect.
The company built something technically astonishing.
The problem is that we, as a society, have run out of room in our lives for another screen.
The average American checks their phone dozens of times a day, sleeps next to it, eats with it, and now someone wants us to strap a computer to our face and disappear further.
The Vision Pro isn't failing because it's bad.
It's failing because it's asking us to go somewhere we don't actually want to go.
There's a version of this story where the headset becomes a tool for surgeons, architects, and engineers.
That future is real and probably inevitable.
But the consumer dream Apple is selling, the one where families gather around a floating screen, is a lonely fantasy dressed up as connection.
Our take: the Vision Pro is a remarkable piece of engineering aimed at a problem most Americans don't have.
Final Thoughts
Until it finds a reason to bring people together instead of isolating them, it will remain what it is today, a stunning demo and a very expensive one.