Kierkegaarden

CheeseFreeze said:

I have an Apple Vision Pro. It’s a devkit version and got it for free. The only real difference with the final version is that there’s an additional USB-C port and tiny cable sticking out. 

It’s clumsy and uncomfortable to wear. It’s too heavy. The face mask thingie connects magnetically and constantly falls off when you pick it up. 

The external battery feels like I’m using an old school HTC Vive again.

But the biggest problem is: there is not much you can do with it. You have your apps, like Mail, but it’s easier and more productive to use your MacBook or iPhone. 

You can have multiple screens all around you but I never wanted that anyway. Not if I have to lose out on productivity. The eye tracking and select gesture works really well but it doesn’t replace a keyboard and mouse.
Most games are projected flat, on a place - yes, 3D games. Some of them are nice but there’s not a single game that is an instant hit like Beat Saber. The FaceTime avatar is nice but incredibly creepy. I tried it with a coworker who has an AVP as well.

There is no real added value compared to, say, a Meta Quest 3, even with the very useful eye tracking. The content discovery experience is sterile, cold, boring, while the Quest has amazing games and simply ‘knows’ that it is its own medium and not trying to be a new sort of computer for productivity.
Similarly the AVP provides no added value to a phone, desktop or tablet either. 

AVP is one of these few initiatives at Apple that will not pan out. They have the money to keep it alive but it’s clear they don’t know what to do with their own invention. 

charlesn said:

"However, as a $3,500 mixed-reality headset that's still in its first generation, it has also struggled a bit to secure sales."

 You state this as a fact. And yet the fact is, you have ZERO facts to back this up. NONE. You link to a report from Kuo, who has been all over the map in his assessments about how Vision Pro is doing -- so which Kuo quote do you want to believe? And even his baseless assessment that orders have been cut is based on the totally faulty premise that they were cut vs a "market consensus" for expected sales that doesn't even exist! There has never been a "market consensus" for estimated Vision Pro sales--like Kuo's own quotes, brokerage house estimates have been all over the map. The 700K-800K "market consensus" figure in the Kuo report is a complete fiction and totally made up. I'm sorry, but as an Apple news site, you have a greater responsibility not to be publishing bullshite piled onto a mountain of guano as "fact." No one in their right mind, and certainly not Apple, would expect that a $3500 v1.0 device of an all-new computing platform was going to be a big seller out of the gate.

Who is VP 1.0 for? Think about it: well-heeled early adopters, the wealthy who simply like owning the latest toys plus developers and companies looking to explore and exploit the capabilities and possibilities that this new platform offers. That's a very limited market and entirely expected. The larger market success of Vision Pro was always going to be tied to future iterations of the product at the inevitably lower price points and more mature development of both the hardware and OS that are necessary to attract that bigger market.

Anyone writing off Vision Pro now is obviously ignorant of basic Apple history: it took many years for the Mac to break through from niche computer to larger market success.

Pema said:

Apple needs to come up with a better strategy to sell a $7000 AUD accessory. We are not talking about a couple of hundred dollars. No wonder sales are sluggish. I would say sales are dying in the US so now Apple has moved to sell it worldwide.