By Jason Snell
June 28, 2024 6:00 AM PT
Apple’s Vision platform needs to do more than get cheaper
The Vision Pro isn’t a product many people should buy today, and that’s not really surprising. It’s an example of Apple playing a long game, trying to build a wearable computing platform over many years. You have to start somewhere.
Right now, it’s a development kit for developers who are willing to gamble or experiment with a platform that’s not going to be broadly adopted for a while, if ever. It’s a pretty intriguing niche entertainment product, but it’s desperately in need of more content. And it’s a productivity product for people with very specific use cases and work methods. Still, most people should not consider buying one—especially not at $3500—and most people are definitely not!
But at some point, long game or not, Apple needs to start progressing and growing the visionOS platform. Mark Gurman’s report that Apple is working on a $1500 model for late next year is a start. $1500 isn’t cheap, but it’s less than half the price of the current model, and therefore more likely to snag curious people and improve the viability of buying one just to watch immersive events or 3-D videos or whatever.
So, not cheap, but… cheaper. And that’s a good start. Right now, the high price of the product is the top gating factor in growing the platform. Even if you’re impressed by the demo, it’s hard to get over that price tag.
But price isn’t the platform’s only challenge. The lack of software and content is also huge. If there’s a cheaper Vision product coming in late 2025, that means Apple has a year and a half to beef up what’s available on visionOS so that it can put itself in the best position to grow the platform when the lower-cost model is released.
The Vision Pro is the result of a years-long development process, which means that the current product as shipped is the outcome of Apple’s initial thinking about the device. Presumably, the people working on Vision Pro have learned a lot, both during the final years of the project and in its first few months out in the real world.
That’s good, because it’s time to reconsider some of the early decisions about the product and the platform. Obviously, this is already being done, because there’s no way that Apple can make a $1500 headset without pulling out some “must-have” features. (The obvious one is the lenticular outward-facing display, but I’m sure there are other features that seemed incredibly important that, in hindsight, are wastes of money.)
On the entertainment front, Apple’s made some strides in at least announcing partnerships with makers of hardware that can shoot in 3D and Immersive formats. But it needs to invest more in getting developers to build their apps on visionOS, and since the size of the near-term market opportunity sure won’t, some other inducement—like maybe even money?—might be a good idea.
And if Apple wants to get serious about expanding and growing the Vision product line, it needs to get over one particular choice it made in launching it. The company was clearly so proud of its advanced hand-tracking interface that it shipped the Vision Pro with no additional input devices. And I get it! “If you see hand controllers, they blew it” could have been one of the catchphrases of the Vision Pro development process. A headset shouldn’t require add-on controllers to be usable.
But just as the Mac eventually got arrow keys (despite omitting them from the first Mac keyboard to encourage using the mouse) and the iPad got an Apple Pencil (despite being a touch-first interface), it’s time for Apple to get over itself, and either build precision hand controllers for visionOS or build an API and make a partnership with a third-party accessory developer.
The fact is, lots of games and game-adjacent apps require a level of precision that Apple’s (excellent) hand tracking just can’t muster. Every Vision Pro game I’ve played that featured hand tracking has been a sloppy mess. I get that Apple wanted to show off its hand tracking and lean into “spatial computing” to send the message that the Vision Pro is not a game console but a serious device, but in doing so, it turned its back on the most popular category of entertainment software in the entire VR headset category.
One way for Apple to entice people to the visionOS platform—especially if a much cheaper model is on the way—is to load up on entertainment content. 3-D movies and immersive video are great, and if Apple’s not trying very hard to cut deals and encourage more content that shines on Vision Pro, it’s going to have wasted all of its effort. But if the platform can play games, if developers can port their games to visionOS from other VR platforms, it increases the viability of the product.
I’ve got a Vision Pro and a Meta Quest 3. And yet the Quest 3, which costs about one-seventh of the price of the Vision Pro, is a vastly superior platform when it comes to playing certain kinds of games. Games just require precision positioning (through detailed movement tracking), and input (via on-controller buttons) that waving your hands and tapping fingers together in Vision Pro just can’t match.
So, does Apple want visionOS to succeed or not? If it does, it needs to build or support hand controllers by the time a cheaper visionOS device ships. It needs to fill the platform with fun, fast-twitch games, exercise apps, and other stuff that’s proven successful elsewhere. No, the Vision Pro is not a games console. But if it stands defiantly against that kind of use case out of some sort of dogmatic opposition, Apple will have made it that much harder for an already hard-to-sell platform to succeed.
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