Apple’s Vision Pro enters a troubled market.
I say troubled because people have so far largely rejected head-mounted devices. Though before the iPod arrived, the market didn’t care much for digital music players, and before the iPhone, people didn’t care much for screen-based phones. So this should be familiar territory for Apple.
The iPod and the iPhone were both Steve Jobs-launched products — and after Jobs, you must stretch to find similar success, let alone a break-out product like the iPod and iPhone. The iPad seemed to lose momentum after Jobs died in 2011, and the Apple Watch (which broke Jobs’ naming convention but was a very good device) didn’t quite match those earlier iconic devices. (The internal decision to marry the Apple Watch to only the iPhone severely limited its potential market.)
