Apple's Vision Pro launched at $3,499 with 200,000 pre-orders in ten days, but crashed fast. The headset lasted only 1.5 hours on battery, required an external power belt, and caused head discomfort. Netflix and YouTube refused to build apps for it, leaving users with almost nothing to do.
In 2023, Apple launched what was supposed to be the next format for everybody to do computing, the Vision Pro. It was going to be $3,499, and it started out really great. They sold out all their pre-orders within 18 minutes, and within 10 days, they had bookings for 200,000 Vision Pros. But that's when things started to go horribly wrong. Within 2 weeks, buyers started to return the devices. When it came out in February 2024, it was the most expensive consumer product that Apple had ever produced. There was a good reason for that. Reviewers were super impressed. It was like wearing science fiction on your face, and they had special screens inside of it that cost $350 each eye from Sony that would produce 23 million pixels of basically reality projected onto your brain. But then people started living with it. You had an hour and a half of battery power. You had to wear a belt around yourself to keep the thing powered. And then if you wore it for more than an hour or two, your head started to hurt. The thing was just like slapping an iPad on your face. Netflix and YouTube, they refused to build apps for the thing. And it only launched with a small fraction of the millions of apps that you see on the iPhone. And one store employee said the biggest people returning the devices were YouTubers. Like yours truly, who had bought it with the idea of making content and then returned it. Apple shipped a grand total of 390,000 Vision Pros, which seems like a lot until you realize they ship nearly a quarter of a billion iPhones per year. And by the next year, in late 2025, they had totally halted production and sold that quarter during the holiday season only 45,000 Vision Pros. The reality in business is features and benefits are two radically different things. And if you're gonna build a feature into something, it has to provide a benefit to the user. In this case, Apple built a whole bunch of features, nobody saw any value in them. In the end, that's fundamental error created perhaps the biggest disappointing outcome of any product launch in the history, well, of one of the greatest companies in the world, Apple. If you're interested in a deep dive on the rise and fall of the Vision Pro, I did a long-form video of it. Link is in the comments below.
