Apple opened pre-orders for Vision Pro on January 19th, shipping February 2nd. A $3,499 device with no keyboard and no mouse in a market that does not exist yet. The question is whether Apple can create the market, as it did with iPhone and iPad.
What Apple is betting on
Apple's spatial computing bet is that the next interaction paradigm is looking at things in space rather than touching a flat screen. The Vision Pro's hand and eye tracking removes the need for a physical controller. You look at what you want to interact with and pinch to select it. At the software level, applications can exist anywhere in your physical space, not just within a rectangular screen. Apple believes this is where personal computing goes. The Vision Pro is version one of that bet.
The developer bet
SwiftUI applications designed for iPhone and iPad run on Vision Pro as floating flat windows, which is useful but not spatial. visionOS-native applications that use RealityKit can place 3D content in the real world, understand the room's geometry, and anchor virtual objects to real surfaces. The developer bet is that the visionOS SDK is compelling enough that developers invest in building experiences that are not possible on a flat screen. Apple's track record on getting developers to invest in new platforms is strong.
The enterprise pre-order signal
A significant portion of the first-wave pre-orders came from enterprise customers evaluating Vision Pro for specific workflows. Reports from early enterprise buyers focused on design review, surgical planning, industrial maintenance, and field services. These are use cases where spatial data visualisation has obvious value and where the $3,499 price is a rounding error in a deployment budget. Consumer adoption at that price is uncertain. Enterprise adoption for specific high-value workflows is a different calculation.
The AR/VR graveyard context
Microsoft HoloLens lost $500M before Microsoft significantly scaled back its ambitions. Meta's Quest, despite strong sales numbers, has not produced the enterprise productivity applications Meta hoped for. Google Glass ended in quiet retreat. The AR/VR market has produced several technically impressive devices that found no mainstream adoption. Apple's hypothesis is that the failure mode was software and interaction design, not the concept. Vision Pro is a test of that hypothesis.