this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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Lol I'm a former diehard Apple hater that's been using an iPhone for 4 years and loves Apple Silicon Macs.
But I still do think they've done a lot of idiotic things lately. iOS 26 works fine on my phone (some people are reporting performance issues), but the UI is hit and miss.
Apple Vision Pro seemed doomed from the get go, but they really made it worse by not launching a cheaper headset with Air branding half a year or a year in to actually drive market share enough to make it worthwhile for developers. Could've given it an A series CPU since we now know it works in a laptop so why not in XR or whatever they're calling this.
I think that they shot themselves in the foot by trying to make it a computer that goes on your face, and have it do as much as possible.
The interface is weird, and comes with a bunch of features that don't seem very useful. The eye thing is simply odd, and the keyboard seems like it would run into the same problems that those laser keyboards that were all the rage back in the day had, where it's awful to type on, since you get no feedback, and are just whacking your hand against a solid surface.
If they had stripped it all the way down into basically being a wearable monitor you can plug into your devices, with workspaces you can expand or move around as you like, in lieu of having a bunch of monitors, it would have been more of a sell.
As it is, it comes across as a proof-of-concept that's stuffed to the gills with gimmicks to try and make it fit a niche, which in turn makes it seem a toy more so than anything else.
Every decision made about the vision pro was idiotic. They didn't even have a developer kit so you had to buy the full price to device and you didn't even get developer options for your trouble so no one developed for it. It wasn't available outside of North America, it didn't have a controller so interactions were clunky, it didn't support gaming which is basically what a VR headset is for, it would only interact with an MacBook making the effective price even higher, it was uncomfortable, the battery was a randomly a separate part to absolutely zero customer benefit as it wasn't hot swappable, after the big swanky launch event Apple proceeded to completely forget about it and didn't release any updates, and as you say they never made an affordable version.
Literally every other VR headset was a superior option, and apples attempt to rebrand the product as "spatial computing" just confused everyone.
Yeah i dont know. Its a tool/technology. It found a somewhat stable market in gaming and lots of its development is tied to the gaming sector. But saying that is basically what its there for is underestimating its future potential by a lot.
It was also not meant to be VR but rather pass through AR (smart approach for now as optical AR is still not as high fidelity)
Again, thats not what they were going for. Cook is apparently super excited about AR & spatial computing and kinda jumped the gun a bit if you ask me. But this was no "Oh no the gamers wont buy it because of the quest or the index etc., quick rebrand it as a spatial computing device"
This stuff is going to fundamentally change how we interact with technology in the next 100 years but apple adapting things when they had their kinks worked out and are ready for a broad audience made it a confusing product coming from them.
That’s my thought too. The Vision Pro is more Newton than anything it’s compared to today. I’m sure that there will be echoes of it in some piece of tech in the next 10-15 years, but it’s not the right device for the right time right now for most people.
That's what I mean though everyone understands VR to be a gaming peripheral first and foremost. Apple then came in to that market with a non-gaming focused VR headset (sorry AR special computing headset) with no obvious practical application.
What am I supposed to do with it it can't game but it also can't do anything else. I literally can't even watch YouTube videos on it. I can watch VR videos on my phone with a piece of cardboard yet this several thousand dollar device from Apple can't do that. So why would I buy it?
I think Vision Pro was doomed regardless. Go back and watch the iPhone announcement, then the Vision Pro announcement. Every single person in the auditorium when Jobs is presenting the iPhone is thinking of the thousand things they can do with that device. In the Vision Pro announcement, there’s none of that energy. If they released something that left zero question as to its purpose, the price could sit at $3K and they wouldn’t be able to make them fast enough. Instead we got an Oculus that won’t support most games and costs 6 times as much.
The vision pro utterly baffles me. When they were making the product did no one ever raise the question of what exactly the product they were making was for, because every single reviewer said exactly the same thing, which was that it was an incredibly advanced product, with zero utility.
Andrew Ti has proposed that part of the problem that the VP exemplifies is that the Bay Area is too expensive for regular people to live in, so you have tech millionaires in their little bubbles never getting input from regular people. Specifically from teenagers. If Apple had taken the VP to malls in (say) Minneapolis and Dallas and LA and Newark, the people wearing it would have been roasted by teenagers, and the designers and engineers would know there was still work to do.
Does anyone even like it? I haven't seen anyone online or offline that actually even remotely likes it.
Edit: Nevermind, found the first guy further down the thread
It’s…fine. I miss the direct skeuomorphic design language of the older iOS.
Ever since about the time of Windows 8 I felt like all computers were just designed for other computers.
The skeumorphic days of the early 2000s were nice, and gave things a bit of character. The current trend of having everything be flat colours is fine, but does lose a little bit of that whimsy.
Admittedly, part of it might also just be that the grass is greener. We could easily be saying the same thing in reverse if we were still on the gel look of the time.
Not a fan of the bubble bobble theme
Don't get me wrong, they have some great things about it. Garage Band, for instance. It's just not forward thinking, not quality or design oriented anymore, and tries to keep you on their cloud pretty strongly. At least that's how it was around 2017.
Remember iTunes, if I had gone out with the intention of making an inferior product I don't think I would have succeeded. I cannot believe that they were prepared to slap their name onto that utterly garbage piece of software and then proceed to never fix it.
It's still a bewildering oversight that, or something just like it, is the only way you can link with a device.
If you stuff your phone with photos, you can't delete them by connecting them to a computer and sorting through them on that. You have to use a utility to import them either straight onto the computer, or delete them separately on the phone. Even if you use a Mac instead of a PC, you basically need to work with an iTunes-like interface.
Especially with the focus on trying to make the iPad a computer. You're still largely relegated to the iTunes-type interface, unless you sidestep it with a cloud service, or Airdrop.