Apple’s hardware may not be the Vision Pro’s most significant advantage.
Apple leveraged the Vision Pro’s hefty price tag of $3,499 to gain a substantial edge over its competitors. Boasting dual 4K displays and powered by one of the top-tier laptop chips available, this headset sets itself apart. Furthermore, it incorporates advanced eye and hand-tracking technologies.
However, its most significant advantage transcends monetary value: the extensive Apple developer ecosystem. This advantage positions the headset uniquely, as it allows iPhone and iPad developers to seamlessly integrate their existing apps into the device’s operating system using familiar tools and frameworks.
In stark contrast to Meta, Valve, PlayStation, and HTC headsets, which heavily rely on apps and games created in Unity or OpenXR, Apple’s system offers a distinctive proposition. While competitors such as the Meta Quest provide certain essential apps like Microsoft Office, Xbox, and Netflix, their offerings are limited beyond those. Over the years, Meta’s headset has been on the market; the Meta Quest Store has only released approximately 400 games and apps. While not necessarily a negative aspect, it indicates a significant dearth of VR-optimized content in the market.
In contrast to other headset ecosystems, Apple is making an ambitious promise of offering hundreds of thousands of apps right from day one.
This impressive feat is made possible by leveraging their previous work on various platforms. Apple’s approach involves automatically converting iPad and iPhone apps into a unified and scalable 2D window that seamlessly functions on the Apple Vision Pro headset. What’s more, developers won’t need to put in any additional effort unless they choose to make specific modifications.
For those developers interested in crafting new experiences exclusively for the headset, Apple has streamlined the process by ensuring familiarity with its ecosystem. They have designed the development journey for visionOS, their cutting-edge mixed reality operating system, to be easily accessible to those already well-versed in Apple’s ecosystem. This initiative aims to encourage and empower developers to create innovative apps tailored specifically for the Apple Vision Pro headset.
