This is unsurprising. The tech just isn't there yet. It may never be more than a niche product and has some fundamental problems (eg displaying black).
Apple generally isn't on the cutting edge of things. Apple's primary positioning is to take something that's proven and make it not suck. There was Internet on phones before the iPhone. There was a time when you had to tell your OS if your Wifi was WEP, WPA or WPA2. There were MP3 players befofe the iPod.
Exactly. Apple is good at product design and hardware/software integration.
AR/VR is much more difficult than people expected, there are fundamental issues, on the optical side (lenses, projection, depth, fov) and on the 6DOF tracking side (latency, robustness, occlusion handling.
Once all of that is really working, then we cal talk about batteries, weight, design, software.
I am not convinced that AR/VR is something that will replace screens any time soon.
It is a good reminder that technology improvement is not a given and not magical, it is pushed by hard work and quite often the results are not there.
In the 60s many people were convinced that flying cars, domestic robots and spaceships were only a few decades away.
People fall into some interesting traps when it comes to technology.
A huge one is around FTL travel and communication. Any weird idea for this gets attention basically because people want it to be true. You'll often find defenses like "well, people once said it was impossible to [get to space,fly,go to the Moon]", which is a specious argument and (deliberately) ignores all the very real problems.
Another is putting a lot of weight in fiction. This applies to the FTL issue too (eg Star Trek, Star Wars) but goes well beyond it. There are a whole bunch of literary devices that make for an interesting read eg teleportation, telepathy, telekinesis, levitation, (unaided) flying, any form of magic and space flight working like flight in an atmosphere.
VAR has a big latency problem to contend with. Even AR does but in this case it's just rendering latency. But that's still significant.
Apple generally isn't on the cutting edge of things. Apple's primary positioning is to take something that's proven and make it not suck. There was Internet on phones before the iPhone. There was a time when you had to tell your OS if your Wifi was WEP, WPA or WPA2. There were MP3 players befofe the iPod.