When Apple unveiled the Vision Pro, almost three (!) years ago, I concluded:
If there’s one company that can convince people to spend $3500 to strap an isolating dystopian glowing robot mask onto their faces it’s Apple, but I still have a hard time believing this is what people want.
↫ Thom Holwerda at OSNews (quoting myself is weird)
MacRumors’ Juli Clover, today:
Apple has all but given up on the Vision Pro after the 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.
[…]Apple has apparently stopped work on the Vision Pro and the Vision Pro team has been redistributed to other teams within Apple. Some former Vision Pro team members are working on Siri, which is not a surprise as Vision Pro chief Mike Rockwell has been leading the Siri team since March 2025.
↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors
VR – what the Vision Pro is, whether Apple’s marketing likes to say it or not – has proven to be good for exactly two things: games and porn. The Vision Pro has neither. It was destined to be a flop from the start, as nobody wants to strap an uncomfortable computer to their face that does less than all of the other computers they already have, and what it does do, it does worse.
I do wonder if this makes the Vision Pro the most expensive flop in human history. Has any company ever spent more on a product that failed this spectacularly?
> Has any company ever spent more on a product that failed this spectacularly?
Not to mention the opportunity cost
That is a bit unfair. Any company will have some number of failures and the remarkable thing about Apple is how few they have fielded.
The Vision Pro is of course one of those. But a quick search says that the development costs were about 1/8th to 1/4th of what Facebook/Meta/Reality Labs spent to develop the Metaverse, but probably about five times what Alphabet spent to develop Google Glass.
Brainworm,
Facebook’s spending on their VR was insane. If average sized businesses made the same bets, they’d go out of business, but it doesn’t really phase tech giants at all. They can afford to make these mistakes and it barely has an impact because of their cash cows, monopolies, preferential government treatment, etc they will always have more and more to use however they please. The opportunity cost cosmotic refers to may not be apple’s opportunity cost so as it is ours as society. All of this wealth, on the order of billions and trillions, could do so much more social good and provide critical resources to improve the human condition. But society is paying huge opportunity costs so that a few at the top can get ever larger mountains of wealth instead.
I think Bernie Sanders has a point when he calls out the US turning into oligarchy.
Some of Apple failures were forgotten about though. They’ve had some crackers in the past.
The Apple III
The Apple Lisa
The Newton
The Pippin
And those are just the notable ones
I don’t think anyone forgot about those (except the Pippin), but you’re going back better than 40 years. Compare that to the number of failures from a similarly-sized tech company like Google or Microsoft.
Google, just in the past couple years, had racked up the Chromecast, Steam for Chromebooks, Doppl, Tenor, Jamboard, Tables, Socratic, and Firebase. Granted, not much of that is hardware, but you’ve still got the Chromebook Pixel line, every VR product they’ve made (Glass, Cardboard, Daydream, Project Iris, etc.), Stadia, Project Ara (the modular smartphone), and so on. And that’s like the last ten years.
Microsoft’s hardware history is even wilder. For every Zune and Surface Studio and XBox there are like a hundred things that failed so hard the world forgot about them: the Cortana smart speaker, the Band wearables, the Lumina line of phones, those weird not-quite-smartphones they pushed for teens (the Kin), and literally all of their non-x86 hardware (the Surface RT, Windows CE devices, etc.).
Note that I don’t think this makes Apple a better company. In an R&D-heavy company most of your products are gonna fail. Apple just fails less than most which is why a failure from them is noteworthy when a failure from e.g. Microsoft is just business as usual.
The M1 Mac Pro
Apple Maps (at least early on)
The Trashcan Mac Pro
The Butterfly Keyboard
Apple have had a lot of flops in recent years too.
I wouldn’t say the Lumina phones themselves (the hardware) were the failure, it was Windows Phone itself (the software) that never caught on. The phones — with a couple of exceptions — were some of the best hardware you could get at the time and they still sold millions of them. That’s probably because they were designed and made by Nokia originally.
I would have to say this product lacked… vision.
Yay! Another mountain of ewaste!
@Thom
> VR – what the Vision Pro is, whether Apple’s marketing likes to say it or not – has proven to be good for exactly two things: games and porn.
I’d push back on that a little from two respects; The Vision Pro was primarily a passthrough AR system, the problem being it was a low power standalone headset (Quest), priced like a high end professional peripheral headset (Varjo, Somnium). Added to that, it was yet another platform, with yet another set of apps to buy / subscriptions to rent etc. What Apple didn’t do, is make the AVP a peripheral for a powerful Mac (arguably there isn’t such a thing when it comes to VR3D, as compared to Nvidia powered VR workstations).
Also, Apple is garbage for games, only recently allowing Sony controllers, and porn apps, and the file formats porn apps use, are strictly forbidden.
Apple wanted to make a headset computer, to do the things you do on flat screens in a novel fashion, they didn’t want to make a headset to do the things that *require* a headset.
Welding quick-obsolescing GPU processor, to expensive ultra high end optics, it’s like “Nuts & Gum, Together at Last”.
As a sculptor, VR is the best work tool for previs I’ve ever encountered – I used it to create 1:1 scale versions of sculptures 10m+ tall that I then fabricated in real materials (and hung over an audience) after getting client approval. Its the only way to get real eyelines and correctly appreciate the scale of form over distance.
While it’s losing favour to inside-out tracking, the system I used was an older SteamVR Lighthouse setup, whose significant advantage is the playspece and you within it remain perfectly dialled in to your locations. The upshot being I can model something, and walk around it with perfect proprioceptive place fidelity – it stays exactly where I put it, like a real object.
The entire film industry relies on VR now – every show / movie you see produced using “the volume” or similar active LCD/LED rear projection backdrops uses HTC’s MARS Camera tracking, which is the same lighthouses used for SteamVR. In this system, the camera knows precisely where it is, where it’s oriented, and that’s mapped into a 3D scene in Unreal so the appropriate part of the modelled scene gets projected onto the backdrop for the camera’s eyeline. DoPs in this system also wear headsets to get a realtime view of the scene, adjust the lighting etc.
But again, none of this was available to the AVP, because all Apple knows how to do now, is another form-factor for an iPad. The Mac is now an iPad with more memory, AVP is an iPad you wear on your face, etc.
metaning,
We can debate whether Thom is right, but it seems to me that was Thom’s point. Some of the best consumer applications for VR & AR are markets that apple forbade or have weak offerings for.
Those things are fine, but niche. Not something your typical consumer wants or needs. I think these headsets could be really cool to use for onsite architectural proposals, but outside of product demos, most architectural firms would probably find it difficult to justify the added costs of hiring VR specialists to submit client project proposals in VR/AR. Also despite apple’s best efforts they never got over the anti-social aspects of VR/AR headsets. Projecting a fake face on the outside was a valiant effort, but it was downright creepy and reminded me of The Incredibles 2. It turns out that people still prefer to collaborate face to face without having to strap technology to their face.
@Alfman
> Some of the best consumer applications for VR & AR are markets that apple forbade or have weak offerings for.
Absolutely, what they didn’t want to do, was make a device that was targeted at the fields where headset-based computing is actually a necessity.
>Those things are fine, but niche. Not something your typical consumer wants or needs. I think these headsets could be really cool to use for onsite architectural proposals, but outside of product demos, most architectural firms would probably find it difficult to justify the added costs of hiring VR specialists to submit client project proposals in VR/AR.
A VR headset is like a welding helmet – it’s a trade tool for an industry that absolutely has to have them, and not really a lot of use outside that industry. A lot of the same people who hyped blockchain, crypto, nfts etc also hyped VR in the early days of this round of the technology’s development (2016-18). I did a lot of industry outreach to architects, and while they generally liked it, it wasn’t useful from a critical toolset perspective. I was even demoing a SketchUp plugin that let you do all of your architectural modelling in VR; a complete reimplementation of the UI to be Vive controller centric, with tree-based menu icon systems that bloomed in space at your hands, etc.
> Projecting a fake face on the outside was a valiant effort, but it was downright creepy and reminded me of The Incredibles 2.
I was more thinking Cain in Robocop 2.
Even Apple themselves failed bigger with the Apple III than this. From top seller to “drop it to make it work again”
As a company they have a long history of failures, Pippin, Newton, XServe etc etc etc
To be clear, this is what innovation and R+D looks like, not everything works out commercially, but the ideas live on
I will add a third use for VR to games and porn. Virtual workspace space.
A meta 3 with an aftermarket headset and hot swap battery is quite usable for a virtual workspace that allows for several monitors that are the size of theatre screens. All of this costs about $650 retail. I also can wear my glasses with the meta 3.
Now if apple released a version of the Vision pro that provided the same level of resolution of the older models, and kept the price around $800 or so, it would sell as a viable alternative to a desk full of monitors.
As a road warrior, one of the things that I dread about my job is when I have to spend hours working from a laptop screen on a hotel room desk. Other than an iPad, portable monitors are too fragile and you can never get the right position with them.
With my meta 3, I hook up the USB cable and pull out my potable keyboard/mouse, and I am surrounded by monitors and If I want I can even have a football/baseball game playing on the hotel tv.
Occasionally I use the xbox app and connect my xbox controller to the meta 3, and again playing a video game on a virtual 50 foot theater style monitor is kinda cool. However my regular use case is being surrounded by very large monitors.
See, if Apple had just made the AVP a VR display peripheral only, for their existing devices, made VisionOS a UI mode for macOS, iOS etc, made it a thing that made their existing devices better (with the resulting price reduction for not having so much onboard processing and storage), it could have been a really good product. It was making it a self-contained device that ultimately doomed it.
Apple’s vision for the product was to arrange flat UIs in three dimensional space, not build three dimensional UIs, like you have in an app like Tvori. Which again, seems like VR built by someone who doesn’t actually understand VR. It’s really telling that one of the major people involved was hired because he made a VR painting app, where you painted on a *flat canvas* in a virtual environment.
How much more could you miss the point of the medium, when Tiltbrush was available, and let you paint in three dimensions.
Virtual displays from a Mac, where all you got was one 4k screen, was always the most unimaginative way of doing things – it’s just a WiFi-limited VNC session; hardly the most “set the world on fire” use of the technology.
Yep:
1. Microsoft on Windows Mobile and Nokia – $15 – $20 Billion down the toilet.
2. Facebook on the “Metaverse” $80 – $85 billion in losses so far.
3. Bonus – Everything AI only god knows
One good thing Apple got out of the Vision Pro is over 5000 patents they can license and use to recoup costs
Yay, My strategy of ignoring it and hoping it would go away succeeded.. I was worried for a while, you never know with Apple.