Apple Vision Pro shipped at $3,500, runs on MacBook Pro-level compute, lasts two hours on battery, and is too heavy to wear all day. Benedict Evans frames it not as a consumer product but as a polished prototype, the earliest viable expression of a general computing thesis: that spatial displays must first match the text clarity and app fidelity of a phone or tablet before anything else is worth attempting. Meta spent a decade climbing up from VR games. Apple started at the top and shipped it now, unfinished, rather than waiting.
The more interesting argument in this piece is not about price or weight. Evans tests the core claim directly: the Vision Pro is deliberately stripped of VR games, forced to function as a plain computer. If developers and users cannot build a compelling general-purpose experience on the best display system ever put into a headset, Evans argues, the entire spatial computing category may have a structural problem, not just a hardware maturity problem. His parallel to the Apple Pencil is pointed: technically flawless for nearly a decade, and largely irrelevant to how anyone actually computes.
Evans closes without a clean answer, which is the reason to read the full piece. He raises the unresolved question of whether computing interfaces are 2D because screens are flat, or because human tasks are flat, and whether 3D space is a genuine interface primitive or another form of skeuomorphism. He also cites the mobile analogy honestly and then immediately pressures it: mobile-native apps emerged because mobile unlocked new behaviors, and it is not yet clear what spatial computing unlocks that is not already better served by the device already in your pocket.
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