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Ask HN: What Happened to the Apple Vision Pro?
20 points by pera 16 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 37 comments
The Apple Vision Pro was released just two years ago but somehow I completely forgot about it, does anyone still use it for anything?

I've never had the chance to try one but I do remember many people referring to it as a revolutionary piece of technology.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36201593




It's a clunky, heavy, $3500 nerd-alert flight helmet with a googly-eyes-of-doom projector up front. It has like four apps and two uses cases, one of which is "luxury paperweight". They're still trying to find the other one.

To buy (and keep) one, you have to be rich enough that a couple months' rent is nothing, self-confident (or socially oblivious) enough that you don't mind looking like a Star Wars droid knock-off, and masochistic enough to want to take your neck to the gym every time you want to watch a movie. Not a very big target audience...

It's too heavy and limited to be a useful personal screen. It's useless for gaming. It's too expensive to be an occasional-use-only device. It's a solution to a problem nobody had, and it solves none of the problems people do have. Sure, it had a lot of fancy tech, and maybe made sense as a laboratory prototype, but not a consumer device. You can do more with the $300 Facebook goggles for 10% of the price, or get one of the pricier but slimmer AR glasses (Xreal, etc.)


I like your comment and framing, I think it highlights a lot of salient points about the device. But to be fair similar-style criticisms were levied against the iPhone (right down to price point, nerd-factor, lack of physical keyboard etc). So it's important to see the promise in things too.


> But to be fair similar-style criticisms were levied against the iPhone

Really? That was a long time ago, but I don't remember that sort of criticism towards the iPhone... though maybe my memory is just foggy? It seemed to all happen so quick, with Google copying them with the G1 soon afterward, and then... well, the rest is history. The iPhone was a streamlined evolution of an existing niche (PalmPilots, Blackberries, Nokia Communicator, etc.).

When I first heard about the Vision Pro, I really hoped that they made a much simpler, slimmed-down version of the Oculus, something more like the Xreal glasses. I was surprised when they went the other way instead, doubling down on all the extra-fancy tech that just added more bulk and expense. I don't think anyone ever thought, "Man, the thing VR really needs? A scary recording of my eyes on the front." They somehow managed to find the nightmarish "sweet spot" between dorkiness and the uncanny valley, and then jacked up the price 3x-10x compared to all the other VR headsets...

On the other hand, I do remember similar criticisms towards the first iPod, famously compared to the Nomad and other MP3 players of that time (https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...)... is that what you're referring to?


> $3500

> rich enough that a couple months’ rent is nothing

I largely agree, but I would like to know where rent is $1750/month,

I live in a low cost of living state and my rent is $3000


$3000 for what? That seems high outside of in-demand urban areas. In the rural parts of Oregon and California where I've lived, $2000 would get you a nice house with 2 or 3 bedrooms, and $1750 would get you a studio or 1 bedroom pretty easily. It just depends.

As a single dude, I don't think I've ever paid $3000 for rent, anywhere I've lived, urban or rural. I think $2200 was the max and that was for a nicer short term rental.

Some figures: https://www.apartments.com/rent-market-trends/us/


3 bed 2 bath house in the suburbs. In an above average, but not affluent area outside of a major city.

Average rent for the city + suburbs is around $2400/month but that includes houses as well as apartments.

It looks like the link you shared is focused on 700sqft apartments. The national average rent for a 3 bed house shows to be $2400


Yeah, I can believe that.

I've never been rich enough to be able to rent a single-family house to myself, only with several roommates or a partner. So to me "rent" has always been "cheap small apartment in a relatively safe but not luxurious part of town". It's all relative :)

Even now, with a steady partner, both mid-career and in our late 30s/early 40s, we can only afford to rent one half of a duplex (for about $2000). That gets us 2bd/2ba next to a nice little hiking spot though, so we feel quite lucky!

It's a very different life than the millionaire FAANG folks live, I assume. We barely scrape by month to month, but we're content and grateful for what we do have :)

Just means no Vision Pro in our futures, lol. But if someone comes out with a good $300-$500ish wearable virtual monitor, I'd love that. Curious about the Xreals...


Detroit Michigan rents out studios for like 600-700 bucks


Lots of places (specially southeastern portion of the US) if you work remote - studio sized apartments in Georgia can easily be found for around 1000 / month.

I lived in the Stone Mountain area a few years back in a small house (2bd 1ba) for about $1200 / month.


It looks like my gut reaction was due to a mismatch in what is being rented.

I live in the suburbs where apartments are rare. The average renter is a family renting a 2-3 bedroom house for around $2400/month.

> I lived in the Stone Mountain area a few years back in a small house (2bd 1ba) for about $1200 / month.

a quick peak at zillow shows only one house listed for less than 1400/month in Stone Mountain. Average for a 1200sqft 2b1b today seems to be around 1800/month.


I'm sure its more now than it was ~5 years ago. A cursory glance on Trulia shows you can still snag reasonably sized houses for around $1400-1600. It doesn't have to be Stone Mountain (Tucker, Decatur, etc are all adjacent) and fine areas.

There's not a huge number, but I see some:

$1600 / month (3bd 2ba ~1400sqft) https://www.trulia.com/home/5449-pepperwood-ct-stone-mountai...

$1400 / month (3bd 3ba ~1400sqft) https://www.trulia.com/home/640-woodcrest-manor-dr-stone-mou...

$1600 / month (3bd, 2ba, ~1100sqft) https://www.trulia.com/home/1616-w-austin-rd-decatur-ga-3003...

So it is very doable in Southeast US. I'm not sure where you live where the average rent is $2400 for a similarly sized 2-3 bedroom house, but if you work remotely - it's trivial to find significantly cheaper rents.

I live in a fairly urbanized walkable city so I haven't rented a house in a while. Here $3k / month would get you a pretty posh pad, but it's far more than I spend on my flat.


i live in Portland OR and we visited your area 3 years ago. i was amazed by the affordable price of big, nice houses in fantastic locations outside Atlanta. always front of mind when i think of best-value places to move if we ever decided to uproot

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Have you ever wondered where the people who make less than $70k/year live?


No, I know people who make that much.

They are either married or have roommates and spend roughly %20 of their income on housing.

At $140k/year that works out to about $2300/month.


There are also countries outside the US. Rent is different per country and region and lifestyle and age range and a whole bunch of other factors


I bought it to use for its Mac Virtual Display functionality and it was OK, then it released the ultrawide option and it was wonderful. Still use it almost daily.

> I've never had the chance to try one

Definitely book a demo even if you decided you are not going to get one.


The people still using the AVP that I know of are using it to watch movies and use it as virtual displays for their Macs.


Those and moonlight. I also don’t have to bring my laptop on vacations either - vpn, ssh, rdp all work great

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Neat! I presume you mean this? https://github.com/lprhodes/moonlight-vision-pro

I hadn't heard of this. The app streaming functionality looks really cool.

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The TestFlight looks to be full but is here - https://testflight.apple.com/join/poWcaME5

It seems to be a different repo than the one you sent. You can use the regular iPad app from the iOS store too - but the XR version has some neat features specifically for the Vision Pro.

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I was in an empty Apple store the other day and thought about asking for a demo since they have them set up, but then I realized it could blow my mind and I'd still never spend $3,500 on a heavy head-worn computer that is limited like iOS.


Imo the execution was a disaster. As it stands it's a pretty useless device because of the lack of controllers... I work with a company who builds interactive educational experiences in VR and even they can't use it because it can't do basic things like accurately keep track of hand positioning or gestures (beyond pitch).

Really the only use case for it is as a media device, but the price is way too high to buy it for that alone.

If the hope was that businesses and developers were going to buy one and start developing an ecosystem around it then they probably should have made it more than a glorified 3D TV, or made it much cheaper so it was more widely accessible.

I hear there's rumours they're going to add handsets soon though, so if they can do that while also bringing the price down a little that might help adoption a bit.


The other comments aren't surprising.

They released new hardware,but it really didn't differentiate itself in features or pricing from the existing market. There was no revolutionary use case to drive it forward. Existing competitors, such as HoloLens, already locked up the corporate market for things like maintenence spec or blueprint overlays. With a price point that is too high for mass consumer adoption, it's no surprise it flopped in the retail market too. Basically, the easiest answer for what happened to Apple Vision Pro is to just look up what happened to HoloLens. It's the same basic story, just a decade in advance.


VisionOS 26 was announced at WWDC25: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/visionos-26-introduce...

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Revolutionary technology I think needs to be something that gets across that early adopter chasm. We haven't really seen any 3D or goggle tech do that. There are VR things but I wouldn't consider VR video games a mainstream set of people. Mainstream to me is smartphones, AI usage, etc. things that catch on with the majority of the population.

I think that anything that is going to require humans to wear something on their head for entertainment purposes is not going to make it to mainstream. There will be niche uses and likely video games are a good niche. What is going to compel people to buy something like the Vision Pro when they already have smart phones that can do everything anyways?

Also, humans over 40 tend to start needing reading glasses and with each year of age more and more people need them. Its hard to have any device that covers the eyes also take into account people's vision issues, minor or major.


See https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/apple-vision-pro/#apple-vi... for some coverage. While impressive technology, it kind of flopped, but Apple is ploughing on.


I think the issue is that vision is among the least important parts of virtual reality…an idea Ralph Koster describes here

https://youtu.be/kgw8RLHv1j4?si=-4Grus0FYlBJ6Fnl

And as a result, when X-was-done-using-Vision-Pro, inevitably the headline “x was done with Vision Pro”. The headline will not be about doing a-previously-undoable-x.

Vision Pro does not facilitate teamwork and teamwork is how approximately all important things get done. Not solipsistically. I mean visualize a conversation through Vision Pro versus one using Facetime or zoom. You lose most non-verbal communication if you leave the goggles on.

Zoom and Facetime and even POTS and faxes are what successful virtual reality looks like, they collapse real space — collapse distances —- between people.


You can get AR glasses that do everything useful the AVP can (it can only work as a monitor for your laptop and do some useless 3d TV tech demos) from China for $200. I have a pair and use them heavily. They're comfortable, they don't look extremely bad, and most importantly: they're plug and play so all your software just works with zero compromises.

I think AVP could be interesting if Apple let people actually do things with it but it looks like they'd rather write it off.


I own one, but it lacks apps. Apple urgently needs to incentivize developers to create apps for the platform, and not just repackaged iPad apps.

We should have immersive games and experiences. In fact, even the intro immersive experience bundled with the Meta Quest has a greater wow factor than most Vision apps.


They're still available. Check tomorrow during WWDC's keynote, there might be an update:

https://developer.apple.com/wwdc25/


Ah yeah I see they are still being sold online, I thought they were discontinued


They stopped production half a year ago because they have enough back-stock to last until the next hardware update, rumored for either later this year or 2026.


Shocks me they never even attempted to lower the price, especially given the flop and reported excess stock on hand.

They even lowered the original iPhone price to help it succeed in the market.


I just got my first one and love everything about it. Don’t understand the lack of uptake.


I can give you 3,500 reasons for the lack of uptake


its a tech demo and devkit. Hopefully Apple is working on an actual mass-marked ready product.

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good tech, bad timing. goes without saying expensive af too

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