The Vision Pro isn’t for the average person, let alone spatial computing altogether. Attempts to leapfrog not catering to people who already want and understand XR headsets has led to the mediocre situation with VR gaming headsets today such as Meta’s Quest headset business that has lost 4 billion dollars.
The problem with a tethered spatial headset first would led to the same problem gaming VR headset manufacturers have created causing bad first impressions of VR for the public and arguably irreparable harm to the reputation or word-of-mouth of the category: Bottlenecking spatial computing experiences to be perceived lesser than or not on par with non-spatial-computing software/hardware.
To this day, AAA VR gaming does not have games on par and superior than non-VR current-gen games; they don’t even give devs a chance to: All VR gaming headsets don’t even have HDR to even consume premium content on par with a TV (let alone not even have the resolution to be on par or replace the use of a 4K TV).
Spatial computing is fundamentally a much more expensive, exclusionary, and advanced computing platform that is a luxury that makes much more sense to be primarily sold to prosumers first.
Apple has established success accommodating prosumers, and making such hardware work for them in a way to benefit their non-prosumer devices such as the Pro Display XDR not unlike what GPU manufacturers do with their binning strategies.
The Vision has specs for an audience that pays that much anyway and more for hardware with the capabilities of a Vision Pro. The Vision Pro’s 5K native, 5K2K or 21:9 4K (2.0) mirrored, and 16:9 4K mirror capabilities with Dolby Vision HDR + 5000 nits is competitive with Dolby Vision prosumer monitors before getting into its laptop-class-APU and iPad apps support.
Apple isn’t obligated to ship a budget or low-end VR headset first; it made sense to provide an ideal baseline of a quality spatial computing experience with a device that can be used alongside their other prosumer products first (Mac Pro, iPad Pro, iPhone Pro, Pro Display XDR, and Mac Studio) than spatial computing experiences with clear compromises and trade-offs to non-spatial-computing hardware.
