When I first got my hands on an Apple Vision Pro early this year, it felt like magic. I loved the $3,500 “spatial computing” headset, even though I couldn’t really figure out what it was for. For weeks, I took it everywhere, enduring judgmental glares from colleagues at the office, strangers at coffee shops and fellow passengers on airplanes. I even used the Vision Pro in the back seat of a self-driving Waymo car. But novelty fades.

Apple hasn’t released sales figures, but analysts’ estimates suggest the device has been a flop, selling fewer units than expected. Social media isn’t buzzing with videos of enthusiastic “Vision Bros” wearing their headsets in public, as it was in the days after the device’s release. Some early adopters returned their Vision Pros for refunds, and lightly used headsets are selling for as little as $2,500.

At its annual developer conference recently, Apple announced a few new features for the Vision Pro, including a new version of its VisionOS operating system, new gesture controls and a way of turning old photos into 3D “spatial photos” that can be viewed on the device. Apple said it would begin selling the Vision Pro in countries including China, Japan and Britain.

But these were modest tweaks, not the sweeping overhaul that many Vision Pro fans were hoping for. And the Vision Pro got upstaged by Apple’s newer, shinier project — generative artificial intelligence, which the company is calling “Apple Intelligence” and is pushing into many of its products and services, including a souped-up version of Siri that will be available on iPhones this year.

It’s enough to make me wonder: is Apple giving up on the device that, just months ago, its executives were heralding as the future of computing?

You probably don’t own a Vision Pro, so I won’t bore you with a full list of my gripes about the product, or the reasons I suspect that Apple is losing interest in it. But here are a few of its most glaring shortcomings:

The first, and most obvious, is the cost. Apple may consider $3,500 a fair price for a first-generation device. But $3,500 is simply more than the vast majority of consumers will consider spending on an experimental device that doesn’t replace their smartphone or laptop and that doesn’t fill an obvious need in their life.

I don’t mind the headset itself, although, as many reviewers have pointed out, it’s too heavy to be worn comfortably for long stretches.

But there are plenty of other annoying hardware issues. Carrying around an external battery pack is a bummer, it doesn’t work well in dark or dimly lit rooms, and there’s no good way to input text — so if you want to use the Vision Pro for any kind of text-based work, you have to use a Bluetooth keyboard.

But the biggest disappointment with the Vision Pro is how few good apps there are. Several months after its debut, there’s still no native YouTube or Netflix app. There’s no Spotify, no Instagram, no DoorDash.

Some of these apps are missing because of corporate infighting. But others amount to a lack of confidence. Developers don’t want to make apps for platforms that nobody uses, and their reluctance so far — only about 2,000 apps have been developed for the Vision Pro, said Apple — says something about the device’s tepid reception.

Apple has also been slow to update its own offerings for the Vision Pro, like a series of “immersive videos”, filmed on special 3D cameras and released through Apple TV. These videos were designed to show off the Vision Pro’s high-definition graphics and its “spatial audio” feature.

But Apple hasn’t released new immersive videos at a regular clip. And once you run out, what you end up watching on the Vision Pro is mostly the same two-dimensional stuff you’d watch on a TV or an iPad. It’s fun to throw on the Vision Pro occasionally to watch Dune: Part Two on a screen the size of a basketball court, but most of the time, it’s not worth the trouble.

The Vision Pro is a remarkable piece of technology. And if Apple is content to have it remain a niche entertainment device, that’s its right. But if Apple wants it to appeal to the masses, it needs to make some changes. It should lower the price. It should fix the bugs, polish the rough spots and release more immersive content. Most urgently, it should find and fund potential killer apps — new games, productivity tools and entertainment experiences that take advantage of the Vision Pro’s features and could be reason enough for a person to buy one. To live up to its potential, the Vision Pro needs a little more love and, well, a little more vision.

NYTNS