A fully loaded MacBook Pro can also run Mac apps, Windows apps (with emulation), etc. This can't. Well, pedantically, you could run Mac apps on this, but only by combining it with that fully loaded M3 MacBook Pro and using it as a glorified second display.
By itself, this can run only iOS apps plus apps specifically written for it. I can buy a refurbished 6th generation iPad for $160 that can run iOS apps. So unless the head-mounted form factor and Vision-specific apps somehow add $3339 worth of value, it really is that expensive. It's staggeringly expensive for a glorified iOS device on your face, when you compare it with, for example, Google Cardboard. 😁
(Yes, that last bit is sarcasm, but only up to a point.)
Yup. And that decision basically eliminates the #1 reason people buy VR/AR hardware. I can't remember the exact number with absolute certainty, but I remember reading that somewhere in the neighborhood of 75% of VR headset buyers intended to use it for porn. Apple won't let people put porn on their store. Therefore, by locking it down like iOS, Apple wiped out 75% of this product's potential market right off the bat.
The remaining potential market gets wiped out for other reasons, as noted below.
If they were thinking clearly, they'd launch it with full Mac compatibility, not just iOS compatibility. Apple's bizarre complete control fetish (App-Store-ification) is what's going to end up killing this platform, IMO. If it could run all Mac apps without restriction on day one, it wouldn't matter what software was out there, because it would be a real computer in and of itself. And apps could then figure out what cool stuff they can do with it over time.
As it stands, most of the stuff I'd like to do on this hardware can't be done because of the App Store. In particular, their policies are incompatible with the software licenses of all the Free Software 3D modeling apps I use, which means they will literally never be available on the platform unless Apple opens it up.
And by letting app developers ship apps directly to consumers, that would also give Apple the ability to sell to all the people who want to use it for porn content without Apple having to make it available on their own store site. (Yeah, in theory, you might kind of be able to do some of that to a limited extent with the web, but realistically, no, nobody is going to rewrite software like that in JavaScript with WebGL.)
As designed, though, it doesn't make sense to use it unless every app you need to run can run on iOS or as a native VisionOS app. That knocks out most of the rest of the market, except for people wiling to use it as an external display for their Mac.
And all it would take is Meta spending a few days of engineering time to make a tethered display mode for macOS (it already exists for Windows), and even that market would pretty much evaporate, since the Quest 2 is almost an order of magnitude less expensive.
So I'm struggling to figure out who will buy this other than people who have extra money that they don't know what to do with, and who really want to play with new toys. That market isn't zero, but it won't sustain a product line long-term. And given that 13 years after iPad became available, it still has a tiny fraction of the Mac platform's market share and still hasn't come close to functional parity with the Mac in spite of costing half as much, I can't imagine any universe in which a similarly limited product costing two or three times as much as the cheapest Mac laptop could ever be anything other than a giant money pit for Apple unless they open it up to Mac apps.
The problem with this device is that every idea I come up with for how I would use it is thwarted by Apple's very deliberate crippling of the device by making it a glorified iOS toy rather than a real computer with AR/VR capabilities. And I think you'll find that sentiment is widespread among people who were initially interested in buying this product.
I've been saying for years that the best thing Apple could do for the iPad Pro series would be to make them run Mac Apps, and that is doubly true for the Vision Pro. As it stands, the devices are crippled by Apple's chronic shortsightedness and irrational desire to control what their users can do with the devices that they paid for, and the result is and will continue to be a vastly inferior user experience until Apple gets over that.
My biggest problem is that I want this device as it was originally described — a spatial computer. Instead, it's a spatial iPhone, which I have remarkably close to zero interest in. The hardware itself sounds like it is going to be downright amazing, but as long as it is based on iOS rather than macOS, the software side is going to be so crippled that I can't justify buying it. And that annoys the heck out of me, both as a Mac user and a stockholder.
If this were a dumb headset with similar capabilities that could connect to a Mac over USB-C for $300, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. If this were a full-fledged Mac, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. But instead, it has all the hardware to be a Mac and costs as much as a Mac (and then some), but can't actually run Mac software. As a result, without tethering it to a Mac and turning it into a very overpriced version of that $300 headset, it can't do any of the things I would want to be able to do with it unless they miraculously get a bunch of companies that still don't even support iOS to suddenly decide that spatial computing is a good idea. Everything about that approach seems like the worst of all possible worlds to me.
If this product fails, I doubt it will matter, because the stock market has likely already factored this product's widely predicted failure into the share price. More to the point, as a stockholder (of more than 500 shares), I certainly hope that this is the case. 😁