I’m not trying to send any hate at a random MacRumors forum commentor who I don’t know, so please take this more as me explaining why there’s more skepticism about the Vision Pro than other gen-1 Apple products. From the post:

BTW, I also had the first iPhone, and it was exactly the same thing. I couldn't even cut and paste it into the first version of the software, and the camera was not great, everyone thought it was going to fail because it didn't have a stylus, and not many people bought the first one.

Now look at it...

Vision Pro will be the same thing. When the cost comes down and the software is fully developed, many people will replace their laptops with a Vision Pro. Remember you saw someone predict on a forum.

The author goes onto explain how every single other big Apple product in the past 25 years has had exactly the same reception as the Vision Pro, and closes with:

Vision Pro is the next big thing. Trust me.

I think there is a tendency to flatten history and reduce all nuance away when making this sort of argument. Here’s someone else making the same argument about a different technical breakthrough in 2022:

I’m very excited for a web3-driven future. I’m writing this to the skeptics:

To you that might already have dismissed web3, crypto and NFTs as a scam, a Ponzi or a fad.

Why am I writing to you? Because this happened before.

Would you say the internet is a fad or an innovation that has greatly impacted our world?

Of course, Vision Pro fans and the forum author would surely point out to me that there’s important nuance between their argument and the web3 argument, but I would just reply that this is exactly what I’m saying they’re not doing when they say what’s happening with the Vision Pro is exactly what happened with those other Apple products.

As I wrote last summer, I think the big problem the Vision Pro has that other Apple product debuts haven’t had is that it doesn’t have enough promoters shouting from the rooftops about how much they love the product and wish more people could use it. I’m an outlier who knows quite a few people who own a Vision Pro, and own one myself, and while there are some who love it and use it regularly, I know far more people who consider buying it to be a serious regret. To me, I’m less interested in what the critics who haven’t used the product say about it, I’m interested in how much it’s enjoyed by those who did buy it. The iPhone had critics (still does), but people who got one in 2007 couldn’t shut up about it and people who didn’t have one wanted to know about it. Some people thought the original AirPods looked silly, but people who got them were like, “man, I don’t care how I look in these, they’re awesome!”

I’m generalizing a bit as well, of course, and there were people who bought iPhones and AirPods and Apple Watches and didn't enjoy them, but my impression based on everything I can see is that the ratios were reversed to what we see with the Vision Pro right now.

Maybe as the author says, “many people will replace their laptops with a Vision Pro” when the price gets lower and it can do more, but I would seriously question that is an inevitability. Maybe the Vision Pro’s successors will devastate the Mac product line and this guy will be able to pull out this forum post and boast that he nailed it. And if it does, then good for him! I love having an unpopular opinion that ends up being true, so I hope he enjoys it as well if he ends up being right. I’m just saying it’s risky to say “this is the future” about a product that hasn’t proven itself yet. I’m also saying it’s a false equivalence to say that the response to the Vision Pro by its owners is exactly the same as every other Apple product from the past 25 years. I've been there, I've seen it, and this is not the same.

As a final point I’ve learned over 15 years writing online about tech is that it can be hard to separate out what you like from what is going to be successful in the market. Sometimes those line up, and it’s fun when they do, but sometimes you like something that’s pretty niche, or maybe even something that fails miserably. Minus a few rare cases, we should all like what we like and not let someone else tell us we’re enjoying the wrong things. But if you’re extrapolating out what is going to happen in the future in the market in general, you gotta look outside yourself.