Apple Vision Pro: Should Anyone Actually Buy One Yet?

People buy the Apple Vision Pro the way they’d buy an iPhone — as a gadget that will quietly fold into daily life — and a startling number of them end up with a 3500-euro device sitting on a shelf within a month. The demo is the best Apple has ever made; the morning you realise you’ve worn it twice in three weeks is the most expensive shrug in tech. What you’re actually buying, in 2026, is a first-generation, near-developer-kit luxury headset with breathtaking hardware and a thin, honest answer to the only question that matters: why would you put it on today?

I’m not here to talk anyone out of being amazed by it, because the technology genuinely is amazing. I’m here to separate the wonder from the purchase. Those are two different decisions, and quietly merging them is exactly how the regret happens. Plenty of people who would never spend 3500 on anything else talk themselves into this because a twenty-minute demo rearranged their sense of what’s possible — and a demo is not a use case.

What it genuinely does brilliantly

Credit where it’s earned, because the highs are real. As a personal cinema it’s extraordinary: a vast, razor-sharp virtual screen with immersive environments, and on a long flight or in a cramped flat it’s a genuine, repeatable reason to own one. Spatial photos and video are the moment that consistently goes quiet in a room — replaying a memory captured in three dimensions lands in a way a flat photo doesn’t, and it is not a gimmick. The Mac virtual display turns any room into a single enormous wraparound monitor, and for some remote workers that alone is the argument. And in enterprise and professional niches — design review, training, simulation, certain medical and industrial work — a five-figure budget and a specific workflow make the price almost beside the point.

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The honest problems

Now the part the launch videos skip. The price is around 3500 for the headset alone, before prescription inserts, a travel case, or anything else — this is not a “treat yourself” number. The comfort and weight are real issues: it’s front-heavy, and an hour in, a lot of people feel it on their face, straps and all; physics doesn’t fully negotiate. The battery is a tether — an external pack on a cable giving roughly a couple of hours, which means it’s a wearable computer you also have to keep plugged into your own pocket.

Then there’s the app drought. The marquee experiences are thin on the ground, and a large share of what’s in the store is iPad software in a floating window rather than anything built for the space. The library of genuine reasons-to-wear-it is still small. And it remains a solo device: you’re in there alone, and for something Apple frames as the future of personal computing, it can be a strikingly isolating object to wear in a room full of people who can see your eyes simulated on the front.

Who it’s actually for, right now

There are real buyers, and if you’re one of them you already half-know it. Developers and creators building spatial apps — for you it’s a tool, not a toy, and the cost is simply the cost of the job. Enterprises with a named use case and a budget — pilot it, expense it, measure whether it pays back, and the personal-cost question never arises. Frequent flyers and small-space dwellers who genuinely want a private cinema and will reach for it weekly, not twice a year. And deep-pocketed early adopters who enjoy living on the frontier and won’t notice the money — that’s a legitimate category, and there’s no shame in it, as long as you’re honest that frontier-enjoyment, not daily utility, is what you’re buying.

Who should wait, which is most people

If your honest answer to “will I wear this for an hour a day” is “probably not,” you have your answer, and no demo should override it. The lighter, cheaper model that everyone expects Apple to eventually ship is the one most normal buyers are really waiting for, and buying the first generation now to “get in early” mostly means funding someone else’s research budget. First-generation Apple hardware is a pattern — the original Watch, the first AirPods — where waiting one or two iterations gets you something dramatically better for dramatically less.

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Use the return window as a test, not a formality

If a demo has you reaching for your wallet anyway, do one disciplined thing: treat Apple’s 14-day return window as a genuine trial rather than a safety blanket you will never use. Buy it, then actually live with it — wear it for the flights, the films, and the work sessions you imagined justifying it, and count the days you reach for it unprompted. Most people who are honest with themselves find the number is low, and they send it back having lost nothing but a fortnight. The ones who keep it are the ones who could not put it down, and that is precisely the test you want to run before 3500 leaves your account for good.

This matters more for the Vision Pro than for almost anything else Apple sells, because the gap between the demo high and the daily reality is unusually wide. A new iPhone is good on day one and still good on day ninety. A headset this heavy and this solitary tends to reveal itself over a week or two, once the novelty thins and you are deciding whether to strap a computer to your face or simply open the laptop like a normal person. Let the trial answer that, not the person on commission.

The cost, all of it, and the resale truth

The headline price is not the real price. Budget for the extras, and budget for the exit, because this is where first-generation enthusiasm meets first-generation depreciation.

That last row deserves a cold sentence of its own. First-generation hardware like this depreciates hard, and trade-in and resale values on the launch model have already softened — a thin upgrade or a cheaper successor will only push them down further. If part of your plan is “I’ll just sell it if I don’t use it,” budget for getting back a slice, not the bulk. An easy exit is not the same thing as a cheap one, and the secondhand market has already done the maths you’re hoping to avoid.

My recommendation is the unglamorous one, and I’ll stand behind it: unless you fall into a named category — you build for it, your job pays for it, or you have money you truly won’t miss and a weekly reason to wear it — wait. Not because the Vision Pro is bad; it’s a genuine marvel, and the people who need it know exactly who they are. Wait because almost everyone else is about to spend the price of a very good laptop on a heavy, tethered, first-generation device they’ll wear less than they imagine, when a lighter and cheaper version is the thing they actually want. Be amazed by it in the demo. Then keep your 3500 and let the early adopters debug the future on your behalf.