When Apple announced the Vision Pro back in 2023, it felt like a seismic moment. Headlines were calling it the iPhone of spatial computing. Developers scrambled for the SDK. Demos of eye tracking, hand gestures, and floating windows flooded the press. And yes — I frantically pre-ordered one the second it went live. I had to have it.
Fast forward to September 2025, and the hype has cooled. My Vision Pro? It’s collecting dust on the shelf. I’m not alone. Outside of design studios, enterprise pilots, and hardcore enthusiasts, adoption has stalled. The price tag and limited availability kept it from becoming the mass-market breakthrough Apple clearly hoped for.
But here’s the thing: even without mainstream adoption, the Vision Pro reshaped the conversation. Apple reframed AR and VR as spatial computing, and that shift has stuck. Now every headset is talking about high-quality passthrough, intuitive gesture input, and productivity apps — whether they ship from Apple, Meta, or someone new.
For developers, the opportunity is still real. visionOS forced us to rethink interaction design — no more buttons and controllers, but eyes, hands, and voice. Apple’s design patterns are opinionated, but they’ve set a bar for polish that others can’t ignore. Even if you’re building in Unity, Unreal, or ARKit for another device, you’re building in the wake of Vision Pro’s influence.
The Vision Pro may not be the headset everyone owns, but it’s still the one everyone in XR has to respond to.
And that brings us to the big question: what’s next? Rumors have been swirling for years that Apple is working on lightweight AR glasses — a device that looks more like eyewear than a ski mask. If Vision Pro was Apple’s bold proof of concept, the glasses could be the true mass-market play. Smaller, cheaper, more wearable (my AVP hurts my face!) — the kind of device you’d actually leave on all day instead of pulling out for a demo.
Of course, that’s the dream. The reality is that no one outside Cupertino really knows if Apple can solve the massive technical challenges (battery life, display brightness, social acceptability) that have sunk so many AR glasses projects before. Will they actually ship in 2026? Will they feel like an evolution of Vision Pro — or a completely new category?
