Apple Vision Pro started shipping on February 2nd. The reviews are in. It is technically remarkable, expensive, heavy, and currently short on compelling software. The enterprise use cases are more interesting than the consumer ones.
The hardware reality
Vision Pro is the best spatial computing hardware shipped to date. The displays are genuinely impressive, the hand and eye tracking works as advertised, and the EyeSight feature that shows your eyes to people around you is an interesting solution to the social isolation problem. The battery is separate and lasts about two hours. It weighs 600-650 grams. You will not wear it for eight hours. You will not forget you are wearing it.
Consumer vs enterprise use cases
The consumer pitch around spatial video, watching movies, and gaming has the fundamental problem that $3,499 is more than most people spend on entertainment hardware. The enterprise pitch is more interesting. Spatial computing is useful when you need to overlay information on a physical environment: maintenance technicians reading repair instructions while looking at the machine they are repairing, architects reviewing spatial models in the actual space they are designing, medical professionals reviewing 3D imaging without a flat-screen intermediary.
The software gap
At launch, Vision Pro ran iPad apps in a flat floating window, which is not spatial computing, it is floating iPad. The genuinely spatial apps, the ones built for visionOS that make use of 3D space, were sparse at launch. The developer ecosystem is still early. Building for a device most developers do not own is difficult, and Vision Pro simulators do not fully replicate the experience of looking at a 3D object in a real space. The software maturity curve will take 18-24 months.
The developer signal to watch
The most important thing to track is not consumer adoption. It is enterprise line-of-business application development. If healthcare, manufacturing, or field services organisations start investing in visionOS development for specific operational workflows, Vision Pro has a path to meaningful utilisation even at its current price. If it stays as a general-purpose computing device competing with laptops and iPads on price and portability, it loses.