Can a $3,500 headset replace your TV? We tried Vision Pro to find out

The Vision Pro is the strangest product Apple has introduced in the time I've been covering the company. By now, it's well established that the headset is both impressively cutting-edge and ludicrously expensive.

You could certainly argue that its price means it’s only for Silicon Valley techno-optimists with too much money to burn or for developers looking to get in on the ground floor on the chance that this is the next gold rush for apps. But the platform will need more than those users to succeed.

Part of Apple’s pitch behind the price tag seems to be that the Vision Pro could replace several devices, just like the iPhone did back in the late 2000s. It could replace your laptop, your tablet, your 4K TV, your video game console, your phone or other communications device, your VR headset, and so on. If it truly replaced all of those things, the price wouldn’t seem quite so outrageous to some.

And those are just the use cases Apple has put a lot of effort into facilitating for the launch. Many of the most important uses of the company’s prior new product categories didn’t become totally clear until a couple of years and generations in. The iPhone wasn’t originally intended as a meditation aid, a flashlight, and a number of other common uses until third-party developers invented apps to make it do those things. And Apple’s approach with the Apple Watch seemed to be to just throw it out there with a number of possible uses to see what stuck with users. (The answer seemed to be health and fitness, but the device’s distinct emphasis on that took a bit of time to come into focus.)

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