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Apple’s 2024 report card: Vision Pro 👓

Posted by Matt Birchler
— 9 min read
Apple’s 2024 report card: Vision Pro 👓

This is the fifth and final post in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2024 across their major product lines. I did this last year and you can read last year’s Vision Pro report card here.

Year one of Vision Pro

This is a bit of a can of worms, huh? I bought a Vision Pro at the start of the year because I thought it would be full of exciting new experiences I couldn’t get anywhere else and that it would become a core part of my content creation work both here and on YouTube as people would want to know more about this product even though it was out of their price range. It turns out I was wrong on both counts: the app ecosystem is a deserted wasteland compared to what I expected and Vision Pro content routinely gets the least interest of anything else I write or make videos about.

We’ll talk bigger picture later, but i think the first year of the Vision Pro has been defined by Apple releasing videos and that’s about it. If you’re into documentary short films, then you’re definitely getting a good deal to enjoy in Apple’s new immersive video format. We also got one short film in Submerged, which was solid. We also got John Gruber’s The Talk Show shot in 3D which was more immersive than you might expect.

Apple also delivered visionOS 2 in the fall, which brought with it a few quality of life features like being able to hold your hand a certain way to see the current battery life and change volume quickly, and it added the ability to turn 2D photos into 3D ones in a few seconds. The photo feature is pretty cool sometimes, and can really make some photos come to life in a way that’s really compelling.

On the third party front, we saw several attempts from people trying to improve comfort of the headset with add-on straps. I think these efforts have almost been more significant than the software efforts, which have been shockingly paltry for a brand new Apple platform. Apps are coming out here and there, but there hasn’t been anything really groundbreaking that’s seemed to move the needle on interest. The developers I know have gone from “this is exciting to work on” to “I can’t think of anything interesting to make, especially for such a small audience” since the product’s release.

What I want in 2025

Oh boy, this is a tough one. With the other categories I’ve done in this series, I care deeply about the products and obviously think that they should exist and continue to improve. Meanwhile, the Vision Pro hasn’t proven itself to me as a viable computing platform and I’m still not convinced I’m rooting for a future where hair-messing-up headsets are something I want to normalize.

Surely my hope can’t be a wish that the product is discontinued, right?

Right????

Okay, no I don’t wish for the Vision Pro to be discontinued, but I am a bit at a loss as to what Apple does with this product in 2025. The rumor mill seems pretty skeptical about new hardware in 2025, but I do actually think we’ll see something new related to hardware announced in the calendar year. This could be a Vision Pro 2, it could be a less expensive Vision Air, or it could even be a significant price cut to the current Vision Pro. I just don’t see how Apple can expect to move the needle on this new product category if they let the hardware languish for over a year. That would be one thing if the product was flying off the shelves and they were struggling to keep up with demand, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s also hard not to look at Apple’s other big computing platforms and see that every single one of them from iPhone to iPad to Apple Watch to iPod got a hardware revision by the next calendar year after the original. Whatever the case, I would be positively shocked if I’m writing my 2025 report card a year from now and the current Vision Pro is still in stores and selling for $3,499.

In terms of the current Vision Pro hardware, I think the first thing Apple needs to address is the wired battery pack. Look, it’s not the absolute end of the world, but can we just acknowledge now that it sucks? My Quest 3 has the battery in the headset and it’s lighter than the Vision Pro and is so much nicer to use since I don’t have to constantly manage a wire coming down from my head like I’m using a Walkman from 1998. I know that the Quest 3 isn’t as powerful as the Vision Pro, but maybe it’s a bad trade off to put so much power in a headset that you can’t power it without an external battery. Maybe there’s a reason other headsets haven’t been made out of metal all this time.

There are pretty strong rumors right now that Apple and Sony are going to announce that Sony’s PSVR2 controllers will work with the Vision Pro, which will be good for gaming and general use of the visionOS UI. This will be a welcome update if it comes to pass and I’ll certainly be getting them to make my use of the Vision Pro a little better. The eye tracking is very impressive much of the time, but it’s maddeningly frustrating at others, so having more precise pointers will be a godsend. In theory, this will also make gaming better on the Vision Pro, and I really hope that Apple has some games lined up to take advantage of these controllers on day one. Hey, Sony’s got a few VR games they released on a VR platform they seem to have all but given up on, maybe Sony will bring some of their PSVR2 games to the Vision Pro as well.

On the software front, we’re surely see visionOS 3 at WWDC, and I hope that this update will add powerful tools developers can use to make new types of apps. Critically, I also think Apple needs to do some outreach to partners in ways they’re not used to having to do. The iPhone was the greatest consumer product of all time and developers built for it because it would be foolish not to. The unproven and small Vision Pro user base isn’t nearly as compelling for companies to devote resources to supporting, so Apple may need to grease the wheels a bit to make it worth their whiles to build on the nascent platform. Maybe that’s better rev share deals with streamers like Netflix or maybe it means direct payments to devs to guarantee they make their money back. For many years, Apple seems to have felt like developers needed Apple more than Apple needed those devs, and they treated them as such (see thousands of blog posts over the past decade from devs complaining about this). Now Apple has a platform that is easy to ignore, and devs aren’t flocking to it out of good will. For something to change, either Apple needs to sell so many Vision Pros that devs can’t ignore it, or they need to incentivize devs they’ve alienated to take a chance on something new with them.

How is the Vision Pro as we exit 2024?

It’s hard to say definitively how the first year went for the Vision Pro. There’s been an obsession with how many units Apple has sold this year, but I think the exact number is basically irrelevant. What I will say is that there was an expectation that the number of sales would depend heavily on the supply chain limits Apple had on some components of this product. There was an expectation that it would be hard to buy a Vision Pro throughout the year as Apple would likely sell as many units as they could produce. That clearly hasn’t been an issue, as I was able to pick mine up less than a week after launch at my local Apple Store, and since then literally every time I’ve checked every model has been available at every store around me. Whether Apple could build 400 thousand or 400 million of these things, I don’t think that would have changed the unit sales numbers at all.

But what about interest among enthusiasts? While there are some people who love theirs, it certainly seems like many more people are questioning what they spent their money on.

A big disconnect I see is that Apple pitched this as a way to do “spatial computing” using a new breed of application that lives in 3D space and could only exist in this new medium. From Apple’s marketing site:

Apple Vision Pro seamlessly blends digital content with your physical space.

So you can work, watch, relive memories, and connect in ways never before possible.

The era of spatial computing is here.

Media consumption is in the pitch as well, but they made a real point of showing this as a product you could use for “real work” (a phrase that will make iPad users’ eyes twitch) at home and at your job. I’ve personally tried a bunch of apps and I would say that basically all of them are just iPad apps with larger UI elements for visionOS’s low-fidelity inputs, which isn’t too exciting. Or as is more often the case, it’s literally the iPad app running in a compatibility mode.

More troubling in my eyes (no pun intended) is that basically everyone I know who says they enjoy their Vision Pro for “productivity” is talking about using their Mac in it on a virtual display. Not to take anything away from that experience if that works for you, I get the value, but this basically means for many people the level of productivity features the Vision Pro offers them is on par with a Studio Display. Again, not suggesting this is worthless, but imagine if a Mac user said their favorite feature of the Mac was the ability to use Parallels to run Windows.

I do think the Vision Pro has done better as a media consumption device this year. Its gaming story is non-existent right now, but it has been a good product for watching movies and TV shows on your own. I’ve particularly enjoyed it in my numerous business trips this year when I got to watch some movies in my hotel room in a way that matched what I could get at home. This is unquestionably great. Sadly, quite a few streaming services have failed to bring their apps to the platform, namely Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime, and Peacock, but there are workaround for some of those in a pinch. Max and Disney+ seem like the only video apps actually trying and they are quite good experiences, so I tend to lean towards those when using the Vision Pro. It would be really great to see another big service come the platform, but considering the tiny user base, I can’t blame these companies from holding off until they have more confidence it will be worth their investment.

Quick side note, Sandwich’s Television app recently got a 2.0 update which added a planetarium mode for watching videos, and it sounds cool, but it inadvertently reveals one of the Vision Pro’s weaknesses at the same time: tunnel vision. The field-of-view in the Vision Pro is pretty tight compared to other VR headsets, and that really shows itself when watching in a planetarium which is intentionally wider than your field of view. This is cool in real life, but I found it very frustrating in the Vision Pro when I had to constantly turn my head right, left, up, and down to see literally anything in full.

We don’t know how well the Vision Pro is doing compared to Apple’s expectations, but from the outside it really seems like it’s landed with a thud. It appears very few people have bought one, the usage numbers I have seen from devs with apps on the platform are shockingly low (like an app with 20,000 daily iPhone users sometimes having zero daily users and rarely breaking double digits in their Vision Pro app), and those who have bought one really aren’t trying to convince their friends that this thing is actually worth the money.

In short, I think the Vision Pro is in a rough place at the end of 2024. I don’t pretend to know the sales numbers, but I’ve lived through the introductions of the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch platforms, and none of them felt like this. Apple needs to make the case that the Vision Pro is something people need in their lives and that developers need to develop for, and I just don’t think they’ve done either of those yet. We’d know that the Vision Pro was doing well if it felt like an elite, exclusive product that most people couldn’t afford but were jealous of those who had them. They’d be living vicariously through YouTube videos and social media posts, looking forward to when they could get one as well. Instead, ask any content creator and they’ll tell you that Vision Pro content is poison, no one is looking for it.

Apple’s been at this for a long time and they understand patience is sometimes required with new products. Just because year one has been less than outstanding doesn’t mean the product will fail long term. This does, however require heads-down hard work of properly defining what problems this product is solving for people and adapting it to fit those needs. I suspect this is already happening inside the company, and I hope that we start to see the fruits of this labor in 2025.