The Apple Vision Pro Is Nothing More Than Repackaged VR Hype

CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA - JUNE 05: The new Apple Vision Pro headset is displayed during the Apple ... [+] Worldwide Developers Conference on June 05, 2023 in Cupertino, California. Apple CEO Tim Cook kicked off the annual WWDC23 developer conference with the announcement of the new Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Apple debuted its technologically advanced but comically overpriced Apple Vision Pro Augmented Reality (AR) headset on Monday. It costs $3,500, or as we like to measure things in the video game industry, seven PlayStation 5s.

It's pitched as revolutionary new tech, but while the mechanics of it may be somewhat different from what we’ve seen before, the use cases are exactly the same as countless plugs for Virtual Reality, namely via Meta these past few years in particular. No, we do not have Mark Zuckerberg's legless, joyless metaverse avatars to make fun of, and Apple is avoiding that buzzword in particular, but again, the pitch is almost identical.

The key question I keep running into with both this tech and VR is what does it do better than anything else we have now? What problem is it solving? With VR, at least, you could make the argument about totally immersing yourself in video games (though the market has shown overwhelmingly people still want to play games the normal way), but Apple Vision doesn't even have that.

So, we’re left with the examples shown off in the presentation and the trailer meant to make this thing look somehow attractive:

Vision Pro

I’ve heard people say, "Well, cell phones were clunky for years and then Apple invented the iPhone," like that's somehow equivalent to what's going on here. This is not what's happening with Vision Pro. Apple started developing this seven years ago, two years after Facebook acquired Oculus and were starting to spin up their grand VR metaverse ambitions. But that meant Apple has spent the better part of a decade building something to compete with a product that never went much of anywhere. The VR market… exists, but it's niche. It has not revolutionized anything since the original debut of the Oculus 10 years ago. There were wild analyst projections about how the VR market was supposed to explode into hundreds of billions of dollars. It's currently at about $31 billion.

Again, I am not seeing anything here that I have not seen before. The concept is essentially Microsoft Hololens. The pitch and form is borderline Google Glass. And while Meta may have drunk (and brewed) the metaverse Kool-Aid, at least full VR headsets like Quest and PS VR have some deeply immersive games. Apple instead has some mobile-based Apple Arcade offerings coming to Vision Pro.

And the price is just… What do you even need to say here? $3,500 is ludicrous, even for Apple. You can charge that much for a high-end PC because PCs have proven their value. You cannot do the same for something like this. Though you could knock this all the way down to $1,000, and I can bet you everyone who got one would likely use it for a few weeks, put it down and rarely think about it again (my two VR headsets in boxes have suffered the same fate).

It may be cutting-edge tech. It also does not justify its existence or price. This is going to go badly.

Follow me on Twitter , YouTube, Facebook and Instagram . Subscribe to my free weekly content round-up newsletter, God Rolls .

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.