It hit me yesterday.
We're used to seeing Apple launching a V1 product, not completely knowing what will be the killer app and fishing for the market's return. The iPad is a relative failure from this point of view (after years of trying to use it as my main computer, I just rotated it out of everything I do). At the same time, the Apple Watch has been a resounding success (did you forget it was supposed to free us from our constant phone notifications before it became a health tracker–adding even more notifications?).
In that regard, we shouldn't be surprised that the Vision Pro looks like a half-backed product at launch. The price point and limited availability also manifest how Apple positions this more as a development kit than a real consumer product. But if you follow this thought even further, one of the characteristics of the Vision Pro is that it does both AR and VR, mixes them, and has, with the "Reality Dial," the capability of transitioning back and forth smoothly.
Now, hear me out. What if Apple wasn't sure if the future of the market would be on AR or VR? What if Apple had in its deep drawer products solely about AR or VR, and they're A/B testing us at scale? This would seem silly until you remember how huge Apple a company is and how much billions and billions of dollars depend on this next-gen choice for the next ten to twenty years.
One of the mindset problems we have with analyzing Apple's moves is that they are working exponentially above everyone else. How they think, design, plan, and launch doesn't really compute for anyone else...
