My hot take immediately after watching Apple’s Vision Pro VR/AR goggle launch:
1. Luxury Isolation: A perfect entertainment product for an increasingly isolated, lonely world. Continuing on the social isolation that smartphones created, this product will be a compelling luxury entertainment toy for the rich.

2. Professional: Niche professional applications only. Visualization, modeling and some pro-level, location-based B2B and B2C sales activities (like automotive, luxury real estate, etc.) will make powerful use of this system/ecosystem. But the fundamental amount of tech inside these devices means they won’t be cheap enough for stingy IT departments to deploy widely for another decade, minimum. Without mass corporate deployment, all the comms and coworking features are useless…no network effects.

3. Uber geek: Chic for the technocrats, utterly ridiculous for normal, social people. Google has been lambasted for what – a decade!!! now for the nerd factor of Google Glass. VisionPro is even more ridiculous looking and anti-social. Fine for an isolated, lonely world (see comment #1!) when no one is sitting next to you anyway. Perfect for the misery of long haul economy-class flights when everyone looks like hell, anyway.

4. Design: All the snooty British-accented industrial designers of the world can’t make VR goggles look cool. Sorry Apple, you clearly put a massive amount of effort into this product, the technical refinement is amazing, but it still looks just as ridiculous as VR googles from the ’90’s.
5. Addiction: Extremely problematic for vulnerable populations, especially children. I have to ask a fundamental question: Does this advance society, or hinder it? I’m lucky that my children are now 13 and 15 and will be grown enough to put this tech in its proper place in their lives. But what about young children, particularly those who already have legitimate tech addictions? Children trapped in this AR world with games designed explicitly to be addictive will be like 9-year old heroin addicts — a horrific proposition for the parents to manage any sort of “moderation” with this tech when used for gaming.
6. Education: Could be a legitimate “killer app” that would truly advance society. Rich college kids in specialty programs like med school, engineering or design professions will for sure make great use of these. But for K-12 education??? We can’t even pay our teachers low wage salaries – what schools can afford these things? Maybe by the year 2033, some schools will be able to afford “computer labs” of these things. But even so, will teachers have any training or personal understanding how to use them effectively? Sad, but true.
7. Location-Based Entertainment: Dead on arrival. I don’t want to wear a facemask that some greasy, sweaty scumbag was just wearing for a 1/2 hour straight. Ick.
8. Dystopia: If you haven’t read them yet, you MUST read Ready Player One and Ready Player Two to get a sense of the dystopian effects of a mass embrace of isolating VR/AR devices.

Overall, I predict that Apple will keep these around about 3-4 years before pulling the plug. In ~2025 they will try to release a cheaper version of the hardware. 2-3 years after that, when the revenue doesn’t materialize at the scale of a consumer app-store, Apple will kill it. I don’t think Apple is launching this just to target some relatively niche pro-applications or luxury travelers.

Is it just me, or does the tech inside these goggles feel a little like “Darth Vader getting his helmet for the first time?”