{"id":51765,"date":"2026-04-30T13:59:35","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T17:59:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=51765"},"modified":"2026-04-30T13:59:35","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T17:59:35","slug":"giving-up-on-the-vision-pro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/30\/giving-up-on-the-vision-pro\/","title":{"rendered":"Giving Up on the Vision Pro"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jason Snell<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

John Gruber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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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!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Kyle Barr<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Juli Clover<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Insider sources told MacRumors<\/em> that Apple has received an unusually high percentage of returns, far exceeding any other modern Apple product.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Apple has apparently stopped work on the Vision Pro and the Vision Pro team has been redistributed to other teams within Apple.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Steve Streza<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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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. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Óscar Morales Vivó<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Amy Worrall<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Nikhil Nigade<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I don’t believe the Vision Pro is going away anywhere anytime soon. It literally drove the recent UI overhaul for  OS26 releases.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Andrew Leland<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Dan Moren<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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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<\/a>, and that jibes with what I’ve heard privately.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Heck, if Apple really was killing the Vision Pro, why would it update it in the first place?<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Look, it’s pretty clear that there are lots<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

Likewise, Apple has reportedly accelerated work on its smart glasses product, mounting a somewhat late challenge to products from Meta and, soon, Samsung<\/a>. 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<\/em> if we’re talking personnel who have experience with augmented reality.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Steve Troughton-Smith<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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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. <\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

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’.<\/p>\n

Priority no 1 under new leadership at Apple should be to fix all of this stuff: reinstate Epic on all App Stores, partner<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n