So, there are only a few apps for the headset at the moment and they are all first party. Apple needs developers to make apps for the headset before they start selling it in mass.

If they do not have apps for it, then people will see a “dead” ecosystem and possibly view it as a failed product.

They priced it at a point where consumers won’t really get it, but devs will. At least larger devs will. Selling it, shows the devs that it’s ready for the market and encourages them to get in early so they can possibly catch the wave of new users.

Once there are a decent amount and variety of apps for the headset, they will sell a slightly trimmed down version for significantly less.

What do you think?

  • Agreed! I think there’s also genuine uncertainty about what uses will be popular, much like the early Apple Watch iterations involved some amount of flailing to figure out what works.

    The spare-no-expense approach can be seen as an effort to not close off avenues of exploration before they know what works. When optimizing for cost, decisions will be made to save money at the expense of ruling out some potential appeal, but right now nobody knows what will have appeal. The EyeSight feature seems like a prime example of something that very few would include in a product today because the appeal is uncertain while the cost is high. It might turn out to be a home run of a feature, and this luxury version of the Apple Vision product is how they can gain experience with it. If the response is instead that it looks like googly eyes, makes people uncomfortable, or doesn’t achieve the goal of letting people use Vision while in the presence of others, then maybe it would find itself on the chopping block to get costs down.