Giving Up on the Vision Pro
From the first time I put on the Vision Pro, I never could get Optic ID to work quite right. I couldn’t set it up to work for the longest time, and when I finally did, using it to unlock the device only worked sporadically.
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Worse, though, is that I also wasn’t offered other light shields to compare and contrast, or asked questions about my fit. I didn’t get the sense that the person I was working with knew anything about fitting someone properly. The experience was very friendly, but also quite underwhelming. It’s hard for me to blame an Apple employee for being poorly trained. I blame his employers.
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I’m not sure what led to Apple’s decision to focus on hard-sell demos (for a pricey 1.0 product!) while seemingly not giving the proper attention to fitting the Vision Pro, but I’ve got a few guesses. Clearly the company decided to put its faith in an app that scans your face in order to find the right fit, and perhaps that was misguided. It’s a good start, but it’s not going to be enough on its own—take it from the guy who got two different results from the app.
This seems like it could and should have been so much simpler. Why not have 4 lights instead of one, representing 25/50/75/100 percent charge levels? It seems like madness that green means “charged to capacity” when plugged in, but “50% or higher” when not. That’s a big difference!
Those still holding on to their Apple Vision Pros may remain in a rather exclusive club throughout this year. Market research shows that sales for Apple’s first big, expensive headset will remain low in 2024. The latest reports from those keeping tabs on the Cupertino, California company say AVP will have dropped off 75% by the end of August. The true test for Apple’s spatial dreams may rest on the rumored (slightly) cheaper headset.
Apple has all but given up on the Vision Pro after the [not cheaper] M5 model failed to revitalize interest in the device, MacRumors has learned. Apple updated the Vision Pro with a faster M5 chip and a more comfortable band in October 2025, but there were no other hardware changes, and consumers still weren't interested.
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Insider sources told MacRumors that Apple has received an unusually high percentage of returns, far exceeding any other modern Apple product.
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Apple has apparently stopped work on the Vision Pro and the Vision Pro team has been redistributed to other teams within Apple.
It’s very funny that for Vision Pro, an insanely expensive and uncomfortable device notoriously light on content and use cases, Apple was banking on a minor hardware refresh to save it, and was surprised it didn’t. Just comical levels of being out of touch on your product.
Apple has, historically, had a severe problem building things to a price. The Vision Pro was an extreme example where it would seem they couldn’t say no to anything the execs thought about.
The other major issue I see with it is the same that the iPad Pro has, where it pretends to be a productivity tool but Apple gets in the way of third parties making it so. Notably the iPad Pro is another product that doesn’t sell much and might stay alive mostly off Apple execs liking it.
I’ve had one since December and routinely use it, IMO there’s more room for improvement on the software than you seem to imply and fortunately for me I can wear it for quite a while without discomfort.
The hope would be that Apple sticks to it and v2 actually works as a product (far from the first time with Apple stuff anyway). There’s flashes of greatness here but Apple needs to get off its own way both on software and hardware for it to happen.
They could have gone one of two ways: make it a cheap accessory, or make it a full computing platform with developer interest and not locked down. They managed neither.
I don’t believe the Vision Pro is going away anywhere anytime soon. It literally drove the recent UI overhaul for OS26 releases.
It could totally be the stepping stone to the “Air Glasses” as Juli claims in the article, but I don’t think it’s all that gloomy yet for the Vision series of devices.
Still, my brief experience with the AVP allowed me to imagine a future version where, for instance, the price comes down, Apple opens up the front-facing cameras to developers, and what is already a powerful low-vision device could become the ultimate tool for blind and low-vision people. When I play the complicated tabletop games my son adores, and press a game’s card to my nose to read it, I often find myself wishing I could tap on the blocks of indecipherable text the way I can with a paragraph of text on my iPhone and hear it read aloud. It’s easy to imagine a non-distant future where I could wear a fourth-gen AVP, leveraging whatever comes after GPT4o, and tap one of the game cards with my finger, and hear a readout of the text printed there, along with a description of whatever illustration is on the card, too. If I preferred to use my residual vision, I might casually use two fingers to zoom in on the card (or my son’s face) the way you’d enlarge a photo on your iPhone.
I’m going to say that I’m skeptical of this pronouncement. And I’m not the only one: Jonathan Wight, who worked in Apple’s AR/VR group until 2022, disputed the report on Mastodon, and that jibes with what I’ve heard privately.
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Heck, if Apple really was killing the Vision Pro, why would it update it in the first place?
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Look, it’s pretty clear that there are lots of other projects at Apple that are higher priority than the Vision Pro right now. That work on Siri is clearly incredibly significant, especially in light of promises that are now two years old and still haven’t shipped. Rockwell was essentially parachuted into the Siri role as a fixer: it’s no surprise that he would draw from a trusted pool of his reports to get the job done.
Likewise, Apple has reportedly accelerated work on its smart glasses product, mounting a somewhat late challenge to products from Meta and, soon, Samsung. Again, if Apple is prioritizing getting that product out the door, it’s not hard to imagine that the company might shift personnel to work on it—especially if we’re talking personnel who have experience with augmented reality.
The teams that were necessary to invent this thing (something like 1500 people worked on Vision Pro?) are no longer necessary. The OS is now under the purview of Apple’s existing software teams. And if there’s no third-gen model in development at the moment, all of the R&D attention can go towards the Siri glasses.
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The Vision Pro is the ‘Mac Pro’ of the face-computer category, like it or not (and I don’t mean that it should go away, not until there are lower-end models that outperform it). If it gets updated more often than once every 6 years, like Mac Pro, it would be lucky.
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Apple’s Vision Pro developer story has been bad vibes all round, from the very start. A lot of people have felt burned, even burnt out, with trying to build for this platform. Apple arrived with arrogance and just assumed everybody would jump with them, despite burning bridges with developers for years through their fights against Epic and the EU, among other things. I’ve talked to VR game developers who met with Mike Rockwell and came away thinking ‘I want nothing to do with these people’.
Priority no 1 under new leadership at Apple should be to fix all of this stuff: reinstate Epic on all App Stores, partner with them on bringing Unreal Engine (even Unreal Editor) to Vision Pro, stop fighting EU and antitrust legislation so viciously, and do dev outreach — bring third parties on board, make them feel good about it. The software can handle itself, but the vibes need major work.
Previously:
- External Purchase Fee Stay Reversed
- John Ternus Replaces Tim Cook
- YouTube for visionOS
- 2025 Six Colors Apple Report Card
- Apple Vision Pro (M5, 2025)
- Apple Shifts Siri From Giannandrea to Rockwell
6 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Doesn’t the amazing demand for Black Magic’s immersive cine camera mean anything? Or Apple’s hiring of Alex Lindsay?
Anybody who wants Apple to succeed should be rooting for the Vision Pro to fail. It is a project of massive hubris, with literally no use case besides tech employees who want to make a case for their promotion. It's a suck of resources away from other projects that need it, and if the Vision Pro did actually drive the push of Liquid Glass across all of Apple's platforms, that is a galaxy-sized net negative for all of Apple's software caused by a silly product. The perception of Apple's products is steadily going downhill, and Apple shouldn't be trying to make fetch happen if it doesn't want to turn into just another mediocre tech company (which, perhaps, is inevitable or has already happened).
The consistent theme of people supporting the Vision Pro has been that hey like the novelty of doing flat screen tasks in a three dimensional space.
What the AVP lacked, was a convincing use case for doing inherently three dimensional tasks, in a three dimensional space. Largely, I think because the people responsible for it didn't like, or didn't want to like VR as an immersive 3D workspace.
Where was the Tiltbrush / Openbrush 3d painting app. Where was the immersive 3d Sculpting apps like the much-lamented Kodon.
The answer is obvious - an iPad class processor / GPU doesn't have the capability to do the sorts of serious 3D that actual headset computing requires. The AVP didn't really do anything that could only be done with stereoscopic three dimensional, proprioceptivally valid immersive 3D. Also, it lacked lighthouse tracking options, which all serious commercial headset computing uses or offers as an option.
And that's table stakes for the cost of wearing a headset to do your computing tasks.
Fundamentally, headset computing is like a welding helmet - it's a thing a few select industries NEED, but the general public really doesnt have a benefit from it that justifies the cost.
It's a chicken and egg problem. As soon as I can watch live sports any night of the week in immersive 3D, I'd buy one in a heartbeat. That experience is incredible. But until then, I can't rationalize the price, because I'm not going to pay $3500 for the occasional 5-minute movie and I sure as heck am never going to work with this thing on my head. But as long as people like me can't rationalize the price, not enough people will buy one, and the likelihood of these cameras being an everyday fixture in ballparks and stadiums falters.
"I don’t believe the Vision Pro is going away anywhere anytime soon. It literally drove the recent UI overhaul for OS26 releases."
I don't know if that was before or after the departure of Dye, but either way that was clearly the tail wagging the dog. The entire project seems to have been invented to justify Cook's entire management style.
Completely out of touch with things like EyeSight, the iPad software model, and an extremely high price.
All of those things plus the design seem to have been decided top down whether they were good ideas or not.
Liquid Glass may work on Vision OS when it has been designed up for it and it is in fact something you literally look through, but inflicting it on everyone else was just doubling down on a bad decision.
The Vision Pro release was necessary as a part of Apple's experimentation in AR/VR/mixed reality - it was never going to become a mainstream hit - they had a well-reported limit in how many screens they could order for heaven's sake.
I think @Mayson Lancaster is right - the tools to make the most of the platform are only just becoming available and more content will help a lot.
Social media demands everything has to be either a masterpiece or a catastrophe - but a building block is fine for anyone with a brain that can handle nuance.
