Apple used to only release finished products, but that has changed for a while now.
this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
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Good hardware, shit ecosystem.
Choosing not to support any of the existing VR ecosystems (SteamVR) was a bad idea but typical of Apple in their eternal drive to trap users in their walled garden.
stupid mistake
a device made for gaming and porn should be able to do those things well and out of the box
A mistake so big they made it twice. It's amazing how you can throw like, infinite money at VR with the expectation that consumers will just wear these things on their faces all day long and still fail.
Valve has and will continue to succeed because they operate on the only genre suitable for VR: gaming.
And porn, but mostly gaming.
Does Steam really succeed with VR though? I don’t know anyone with a VR headset and I know a lot of people who use Steam.
I wish I spent more when I did... I bought the oculus rift, then some shit company bought it and tried to claim the hardware wasn't mine, and tried to extort money from me. it sits on the floor doing nothing now. a reminder that corpos are never to be trusted
It's niche. Many people get motion sick in VR and having Meta as the only affordable option pretty much throttles VR.
HI! HTC Vive OG owner here since 2018/19, over 100 VR titles, I know quite a few others with different headsets from Index to Meta to pico, also know at least 3 looking forward to Steam Frame. Tho it is still too niche and these stupid memory prices are going to hurt us bad. Under windows steamVR is great, under linux steamVR is good and getting better all the time, in the meantime there is WLX-Overlay.
As much as anyone does. I'm sure it's at least profitable for them.
Avp isn't a consumer product. It's going to be for enterprise work.
LOOOOOLOL what kind of "enterprise work"? Like Fuckerberg's Metaverse?
No, replacing your laptop, monitors and desk space at work. The price point makes a lot more sense. And so does the hardware inside.
It has a high angular resolution compared to some other HMDs, but it's still not competitive with the angular resolution of traditional monitors.
HMDs in 2026, even at the upper end of the price range, aren't there yet as superseding monitors.
Key point is yet.
Interesting article! I'm not at all up to speed on the hardware specs vs the meta quest so I'm not sure how that translates.
Don't get me wrong
I'd like to have a "monitor replacement HMD" myself, and it's one reason that I've been watching the area. When things here there, I will probably get an HMD myself. And I think that there will come a day
unless some sort of brain-interface thing gets there first
where HMDs wind up at a monitor level. It's just that in 2026, the hardware is still pretty limited for that application.
At a fraction of the price is probably implied, but I'd just throw it in there.
Too expensive. Too insulting from the rest of the VR ecosystem. Would love to have a display like that but not worth it for how limited in software it is compared to other headsets. Steam Frame will have games. Quest has the price. Display, there's Samsung Galaxy XR that gets you the great display without being stuck in Apple land. There's going to be the Pico Swan. Vision Pro didn't spark major software development. Its hardware advantages have pretty much already been mostly matched by Samsung and soon others willing to put out mico-OLED display headsets
I still use mine at least 3x a week. Great for just watching a movie while I work using the Mac virtual display. Who needs a monitor when your screen can be anywhere and nearly any size. I just never cared for the size or weight. So if Apple ever comes out with AR glasses where I can do the same as I do now, I’ll switch.
I can see why people just never fell in love with it. My use is narrow, and other than trying to use it for gaming (limited streaming from a PC for steam), it has no use…
This is what I want. A virtual monitor that I wear on my face. But light and small. I don’t need screens to show my eyes. If they made something like the steam frame and allowed it to work with other systems, I’d be all over it.
The problem with Apple is they don’t like making stuff that works with anything outside their ecosystem. Since gaming on a Mac is more like using a MacBook Pro for a mousepad it wasn’t ever gonna be used for that.
I feel like you'd want some Xreal glasses. Basically exactly what you describe.
Haha I remember the fanboys rabidly defending the cost of this product. Soon they will literally be $4000 paperweights.
Like, i can 100% see why this costs so much. The sheer amount of tech and R&D they crammed in a tiny-ish device for the immersive experience with multiple high resolution screens (including that external one) and all the sensors and multiple mobile processors and all that. Definitely a lot of expensive stuff crammed in that thing... but it's definitely a "just because they could doesn’t mean they should have" or that anyone would want it. Theres no reason outside of a few very small niche cases to warrant all of that and outside of those cases there's no reason anyone should buy it.
Like, they made a pretty awesome product in search of a completely non-existent solution.
I agree with most of what you wrote, but I think it getting discontinued was foreseeable and it not being compatible with anything not-apple was guaranteed. So given those two things it couldn't have been possibly worth it, from the get go.