The editorial argues the hardware reviews were never wrong — the problem is that visionOS lacks a category-defining productivity app that would justify daily use. Apple's own first-party suite (Freeform, Keynote, spatial FaceTime) hasn't seen significant updates in over a year, and the catalog is dominated by ports and tech demos.
A small minority on the thread report regular use, but almost exclusively for solo movie watching on long flights or as a portable second-monitor replacement during travel. These users see it as a niche travel accessory rather than the spatial computing platform Apple pitched.
The most consistent complaint pattern describes heavy use for 2-4 weeks tapering to zero by month six. Cited reasons are the 600+ gram weight on the face, the external battery tether, and eye fatigue setting in after 45 minutes — physical constraints that no software update can fix.
The editorial frames this as bigger than a single product flop — it's evidence that even Apple's distribution muscle and first-party app seeding can't will a platform into existence anymore. Developers go where users are and users go where apps are, and the usual flywheel didn't ignite this time.
On June 9, an HN user reopened a thread from July 2024 with a single question: Are you still using your Vision Pro? Two years after launch, almost two years after the first community check-in, the question itself is the story. The 2024 thread had a mix of cautious optimism and buyer's remorse. The 2026 thread, sitting at 144 points and climbing, reads like a support group for people quietly admitting their $3,499 headset lives in a drawer.
The pattern in the comments is consistent enough to be diagnostic. A small minority report regular use — almost all of it for solo movie watching on long flights, or as a second-monitor replacement during travel. A larger group describes a familiar arc: heavy use for the first two to four weeks, tapering through month three, then effectively zero by month six. The most cited reasons are weight (the device is still 600+ grams on the face), the external battery tether, eye fatigue after 45 minutes, and — the one that keeps surfacing — there's nothing on it you actually need.
The hardware reviews were never wrong; the developer ecosystem just never showed up. visionOS app counts have grown, but the catalog is dominated by ports, tech demos, and immersive video. The category-defining productivity app, the one that justifies strapping a computer to your face for an eight-hour workday, has not been built. Apple's own first-party suite — Freeform, Keynote, the spatial FaceTime experience — has not seen a significant update in over a year.
This is not a story about a product flopping. Apple has absorbed worse — the original HomePod, the Newton, the 12-inch MacBook. The interesting part is what the Vision Pro reveals about how platforms actually get built in 2026, and why even Apple's distribution can't force one into existence.
Developers go where the users are, users go where the apps are, and Apple's usual trick of seeding the flywheel with first-party excellence didn't fire this time. The Vision Pro shipped with a version of Safari, a Files app, and the same Photos app that ships on iPad. There was no Final Cut for visionOS at launch. There was no Logic. There was no Xcode running natively. The signal Apple sent to its own developer base was that the platform was important enough to charge $3,499 for but not important enough to port the crown-jewel apps to. Developers read that signal correctly and built accordingly.
Compare this to the Quest 3, which sits at roughly one-tenth the price and has a smaller but genuinely active dev community around fitness, social, and gaming. Meta's strategy of subsidizing the hardware and paying for exclusive content is unsexy, but it produced a platform that people use weekly. The Vision Pro has better displays, better passthrough, and better silicon — and the average user opens it less often than they open their Apple Watch. The lesson is not that XR is dead; it's that XR is a software problem dressed up as a hardware problem, and Apple optimized for the wrong layer.
The HN thread also surfaces a more uncomfortable observation for the industry. Several commenters note that the productivity use cases pitched in the keynote — coding in a virtual office, reviewing CAD models in 3D, watching dashboards in mid-air — turn out to be solved problems for the people who do them professionally. Engineers have ultrawide monitors. CAD users have calibrated 4K panels. Traders have six-screen setups that cost less than one Vision Pro. The headset has to be 10x better than the existing solution to justify the friction of putting something on your head, and on every workflow that matters, it's 1-2x at best.
If you're a developer evaluating whether to invest learning RealityKit, SwiftUI for visionOS, or the spatial audio APIs: the honest answer in June 2026 is probably not yet, unless you're being paid to. The total addressable market is small, the per-user revenue is unclear, and the platform's future depends on a product refresh Apple has not announced. The rumored cheaper Vision (sub-$2,000, no EyeSight display, lighter) might change the calculus, but it's at least 12 months out.
If you already shipped a visionOS app, the practical move is to treat it as a marketing checkbox and a portfolio piece, not a revenue line. Several indie developers in the thread report visionOS revenue at 1-3% of their iOS revenue despite spending 15-20% of their engineering time on the port. The unit economics of building for the Vision Pro right now look a lot like building for the Apple TV in 2017: technically interesting, professionally respectable, financially indefensible.
For teams thinking about spatial computing more broadly, the better bet is to design your data model and rendering pipeline to be display-agnostic — so that when a viable headset platform does emerge (whether that's a refreshed Vision, a Meta-Google partnership, or something out of Samsung), you can target it in weeks rather than quarters. The skills transfer; the specific SDK lock-in does not.
The HN thread will get reposted again in 2027, and the answers will probably look similar unless one of three things happens: Apple ships a sub-$2,000 device that fixes the weight problem, a killer app emerges that genuinely requires spatial computing (the Lotus 1-2-3 of visionOS), or a hardware partner builds a developer-friendly competitor at half the price. Until one of those happens, the Vision Pro will remain what it currently is — a beautifully engineered preview of a platform that hasn't started yet.
Almost two years ago there was a thread on this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40872102). I'm curious now that more time has passed what people think?
→ read on Hacker NewsStopped using it after about a week or two of usage. The only interesting use case was screen mirroring from my Mac, but that wasn't compelling enough to endure the weight of it on my face. I expected watching a movie would be a good use case, but in reality the brightness of the screen would r
having developed multiple apps on it and tried every which way to use it (as an XR enthusiast in general), I have never been so happy to put a headset up on the shelf and never pull it out again.using as a spatial monitor was cool. for about 10min until my neck got tired of the added weight. but I’l
Not regularly, but I do watch movies on it once in a while (in those beautiful environments), especially when I'm on a flight.WWDC also just rolled out some quite exciting features to RealityKit: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/279/ as well as
Yes, it feels like the future every time I put it on. For work, the ultra wide has been wonderful when I'm not at my desk. I also get to have the NBA playoffs to the side on a 10ft screen while I work. For videos, it's a complete game changing experience. They're slowly but surely rel
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I use it every day, approx ~95% of the days since it launched over 2 years ago. Many hours a day. Far and away my biggest use-case is connecting it to my laptop for gigantic (private) movie theater-sized screen.Getting it comfortable was the most important step. The 6-months-old DualKnit band is rea