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RIP Apple Vision Pro? “From Hype to Headstone:” The Much Ado About Nothing I Predicted.

Apple’s $4,500 Vision Pro was hailed as the “next iPhone.” I said it would flop. Two years later it’s shelved, with Apple pivoting belatedly to AR glasses, if rumours are believed. From hype to headstone, the lesson is simple: don’t buy into fetish, buy fundamentals. And yes: I did tell you so.

Tommo_UK

02 Oct 2025 — 20 min read

The Three Stages Of AVP Grief: “Hopium, Faithium,” and sadly, finally, and inevitably “Desperatium,” which is where the road to rehabilitation begins.

Is it, finally, for now, RIP AVP, if Mark Gurman is to be believed as of Wednesday 1st October? Are the rumours true that this resource-succubus is finally going to to exorcised along with all the other sadly doomed projects of every Apple launch (ex-Apple Silicon, which save the company’s derrière) since 2020?

Long time (ie 25 year long+) readers of my work before I started my blog here in May 2025, and more recent subscribers to this site, will know my position on the Apple Vision Pro only too well, and what I thought of it as a technical marvel, but a commercial flop. Sadly, seemingly, many Apple fans and commentators can’t hold these apparently opposite descriptions in their mind simultaneously and just acknowledge it… flopped, in every sense of the word.

UPDATE 3rd October: This rumour, is being disputed by another Apple blogger, Neil Cybart, who calls a pox on Gurman because he says, Gurman is pulling a typical “much ado about nothing,” and leaving readers to speculate by reading between the lines to “draw their own conclusions.”

**Cybart and Gurman arguing about whose rumours are “more true.” Get me some popcorn.**

I have two things in to say about this catfight:

Who cares about a bitchfest between two Apple bloggers? The AVP has been a dead duck for years, and Apple has given no comfort (or content) to current owners. That’s a big enough reason alone, for me, to call out the company for utter contempt towards its customers (see my comment at the end of the article).
So there may or may not be AR glasses (chances are their will because that was always the plan). Gurman may or may not be gaslighting, but then it’s his job to do that, and get writers like Cybart antsy and annoyed.
Finally, who knows, both could be true - on different timeliness. All we know is that Apple initially had plans for both AR and VR products, and latched the AVP prematurely in an unfit state to go to market. Sure that’s correctible, by Cybart having a public mud-wrestling match with Gurman over the construction of his rumour is really pot kettle black.

In fact my unwavering position about the AVP and the f-up behind its concept, design and launch is a matter of record, both on Apple 3.0 where used to blog daily, and on my own site now, here on .fyi, and elsewhere on other forums.

More below, in the full skinny on the AVP and why and how its flop was predictable before it was born, after the break. {.fyi note: with apologies for typos; the draft was posted in error}

I Waved Goodbye, Briefly in June, As Others Said Hello. **Special “hello” to Ron by the way :)**

Apple Vision Pro: The Flop I Said It Would Be

Prologue: The Flop That Wore Gucci

There are few sweeter words in tech commentary than “I told you so.” But since I am a gentleman, I won’t say that. At least, not yet. Instead, let’s consider this:

In 2023, Apple announced the Apple Vision Pro, the $4,500 (with extras) “spatial computer” that was supposed to redefine computing.
In 2024, it launched in limited numbers to breathless headlines and analyst hymns.
In 2025, it is now quietly shelved, perhaps “paused,” but effectively dead. Like Monty Python’s Parrot Sketch it has “ceased to be,” much though its fans feel like it’s still alive, lovingly boxed, and occasionally brought out in white gloves to show the kids (Gen-Z) why their parents were stupid enough to blow $4500 of their student trust fund on a pair of useless goggles.

And since 2021 — when Dan Riccio took the helm of Apple’s Vision group — I have written, repeatedly, that this product would flop. Not because I lack imagination, but because I have it and use it, and see trends and projections by doing the hard work many won’t bother, seeing reality for what it is, and not in a “virtual” manner. All it took was one glance to understand in an instance there was no audience, no use case, no economy of scale, and no reality in the “reality distortion field” Cupertino worked so hard to crank up. This in contrast to the first glimpse I had of the iPhone when it launched in 2007 and rose up out of the stage into Steve Jobs hands, when its astounding success was such a no-brainer to me I believe I was one of the first people to first predict Apple would hit a $1T market cap, that there would be an App Store several years before it appeared, and then pinned a $3T market cap prediction on the company almost a decade before anyone else had stopped laughing at the $1T prediction (AAPL almost hit $4T last year, but with their AI flub, the stock is only just recovering its high of 2024, now - almost).

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Let’s run the tape.

2021: The Riccio Gambit

Apple’s Vision department was formally set up under Dan Riccio. A long-standing Apple insider who styled himself after Steve Jobs but with a friendlier personality but whose instincts, in this case, were fatally wrong, just as they were to keep the iPadOS hobbled - even on the M4 powered iPad Pro of 2024, so that it “wouldn’t compete with a MacBook). Great guy, apparently, but a lousy product strategist, it turns out. Against the advice of many, Riccio drove the team toward the Pro headset: VR-first, bulky, expensive, hard to shop for, and several mixed-messages use cases.

Tim Cook, by all reports, was reluctant. There were enormous insider arguments with the board split and key staffers threatening to leave. But he let it slide — partly as a legacy project, partly as a diversionary “see, we’re innovating” story for the Street. But mainly, because Tim Cook, for all his supply chain and operational brilliance, is not a “product” man in the true sense, and has a habit of delegating too much.

From day one, I called it: an over-engineered cul-de-sac. My own notes from the time (archived on .fyi and all over the internet including - for those of your who are also Apple 3.0 readers all over Philip’s site) made clear:

“The first Vision product should have been AR glasses — lightweight, socially acceptable, usable in daily life. Instead, we got a ski-goggle carbuncle.” - Tommo_UK, 2023

2023: The Announcement and WWDC’s Great CGI Show

June 2023, WWDC: Apple unveiled the AVP.

A demo reel of dinosaurs, a smiling family floating apps around their living room, a CEO basking in almost-British-accented calm.

Wall Street swooned. Analysts declared it “the next iPhone.” Mark Gurman, ever the obedient conduit, hailed it as Apple’s boldest play in years. Gene Munster nearly fainted. Developers pretended to be enthusiastic.

Doomed To Obscurity From The Outset, Yet Embraced Like a Lonely Orphan by individual investors (and Wall Street, initially) as **“the Next Greatest Thing.”** Oh pity thee, AVP.

I wrote at the time:

“This is not quietly, not gracefully, and certainly not privately, a flop. It is just, a flop. It has no reason to exist. The market will not spend $4,500 to watch dinosaur demos and buy a product that take longer to go for a fitting for in-store than the wait to merely get served in one of Louis Vuitton’s flagship stores.” - Tommo_UK, 2024

And I was right.

2024: The Launch — Limited, US-Only, Low Numbers

Reality: sales in the hundreds of thousands, not millions. Tim blamed supply chain issues. This from the man who designed the concept of modern supply chains, and has never been short of components for anything. From the year - 2000 - when he cornered the 2.5inch hard drive market for the original iPod at the behest of Steve Jobs, and then forward-bought two years of production of NAND memory chips for the next gen iPods, literally locking every other company out of the MP3 player market because they couldn’t compete with Apple and buy the chips).

Sorry Tim, blaming yourself for supply chain issues hobbling the number of (unwanted) AVPs to 400,000 in a limited production run was either incompetent, or a post-hoc excuse.

Frankly Tim, neither reason is a good look.

Furthermore, supply and launch was limited to the US market with a as drip feed to a few “lesser” countries to get rid of the surplus of unwanted stock eventually. Content drought. Developers disinterested. The “killer apps” never materialised. Developers were quietly furious and abandoned the platform except for the few Apple relied on for showcase use, including niche but extraordinary medical use cases and French aerospace company Dassault Systems experimenting with using it for designing new warplanes, though the first isn’t expected until 2037. With luck.

Apple were already struggling to keep their Project Titan car project on the road, and deal with the nascent trauma rising fast of their AI aspirations unravelling like that Studio Ghibli classic, Howl’s Moving Castle, first realised with foresight in 2011 when the company acquired Siri before lobotomising it permanently two years later (see Apple AI: 15 years ahead of the curve, now 5 years behind),

Siri -in 2011, 15 years in a revolution ahead of its time, now boxed until at least 2026

… and then try a Frankenstein-like and ill-fated reboot in 2024 with the vainly titled attempt to own the “word association football game,” even if not the real market itself, “Apple Intelligence.” That was meant to be a ”clever” play on words by some marketing intern which somehow made the Final Cut - you knew it was doomed from the outset even then, the moment Craig F announced it breathlessly after a CGI skydive out of a plane to land in the Apple Campus at WWDC24, at which it promised AI would solve problems you never knew you had and would be fully delivered sometime in the next 12 months, before virtually cancelling it - and Siri - a few months later.

By the way, #FREESIRI

I wrote then:

“The Vision Pro is Apple all-pro, no vision. Over-priced, over-engineered, and utterly absent of daily use-cases. A carbuncle on the face of customers, bought by analysts and influencers, not by the public.”

2024–2025: The Plateau of Distraction and Knowledge Drain (a prelude to the iPhone 17)

Behind the scenes, the Vision Department bled talent. Knowledge loss, reshuffles, infighting. The irony: the only truly successful Apple innovation of the last decade — Apple Silicon — had been delayed and underfunded for years by exactly this kind of misallocation and only a raging row between Tim Cook and then-CFO Lucca freed up the fund to allow Silicon to find its feet and allow the company to transition to an all-in chipset including the revolutionary M1 chip, and now, Apple’s amazing A-Series for mobile devices and its own power management and modem chips.

As an aside, the one question following this achievement, is:

WHERE THE HELL IS AN A-SERIES POWERED, MODEM-EQUIPPED LOW COST MACBOOK, SOLD THROUGH CARRIERS ON CONTRACT, TO OFFER AN AFFORDABLE LAPTOP AGAIN, LIKE THE iBook OF OLD USED TO? TIM ARE YOU READING THIS?

Back to the AVP and its miscarriage: I wrote about this extensively. Dan Riccio was booted out in October 2024, and the AVP team disbanded, with only the software OS (Vision OS) section being left alive, under Mike Rockwell, who was then reallocated (with the Vision OS team) to try and resurrect Siri - a project which itself collapsed in February 2025, admitted as such by Apple at WWDC 2025 this June just gone, and postponed by another 12 months as Craig ”Hairforce” told the world Apple’s LLM was “better than anything else out there and would arrive soon,” in the 45 second slot LLM’s received at WWDC 2025. Later on during the month, he commented that Siri might be unboxed, sometime around May.

2026.

On dating apps, such teasing is referred to as “edging” apparently. But it has no place in Apple product plans and consumer engagement.

.. in other words maybe, hopefully, several years late but possibly in the nick of time for WWDC… 2026, just in time for the iPhone 18 maybe, Siri may re-appear. Craig? Any more words from you other than mysterious mentions of “Project Vertitas,” a “truthful AI that is a Question Answering Machine,” according to project rumours. Gee, I thought all the AI LLMs out there (and GPT via Siri) already did a pretty good job of that, and the thought of an Apple agentic “question answering machine” called Veritas is about as exciting as the notion of leaving message on a ”telephone answering machine” with a cassette tape in it.

The AVP wasn’t just a flop.

It was an opportunity cost. While Apple spent years chasing VR vanity, Siri stagnated. Services flatlined goosed only by financial services and unsuitable products sales. The company grew margins by flogging AppleCare and financial products, not by delivering compelling new hardware. Having just introduced Apple Care Plus One (Pro Max edition on the way?), these margins are going to see another incredible hike, but not from hardware success: just, flogging insurance door to door. Great business, Tim, but hardly aligned with Apple’s values of excellence and innovation in hardware and software.

I wrote in my Sunday Sermon piece:

“The AVP is a distraction. Its only achievement is to remind us that Apple can spend billions to build a white elephant. When you strip away the CGI, all that remains is an impervious aluminium box designed for dinosaur watchers, powered by a tampon battery pack on a string with a two hour use case.” - Tommo_UK, 2025

2025: The Cancellation — Curtain Down

Now, October 2025: Bloomberg whispers that AVP is “paused.” Which is corporate-speak for cancelled.

Admittedly this is a Mark Gurman rumour, but - for once - one I hope is true because it would - maybe - be a sign the company is getting over its need for vanity products and exceptionalism and hubris, and actually - maybe, just perhaps, focusing on amazing and dazzling its customers with a “one more thing,” they might actually want to buy that isn’t a FinServ or instance product add-on. Or, as Apple today suggested to their recent iPhone 17 Pro customers, buy a case, because it finally admitted it has a problem with its “unscratchable” Pro and Pro Max models scratching at the merest hint of moment with a key.

Lesser writers might call Apple’s marketing department and copy writers a bunch of liars, but naturally, I won’t stoop so low.

Back to AR is the new VR

Bloomberg’s “Official line:” Apple will pivot to AR glasses, with a target of “as early as 2026” (read: 2027). The very path I argued for years ago, and dubbed Vision Go in my SenseOS article this June.

I called these “Vision Go” not Vision Air (because frankly, heavy shades with electronics are about as lightweight as an iPhone Air - maybe not as heavy as a lead balloon but still, not an “Air” product).

How I imagined A Pair Of **“Vision GO”** AR glasses with cameras etc, back in June 2025. Doesn’t that sound a lot better than “*Vision Air*?” **Leave a comment.**

Apple has a serious problem with its nomenclature principles in my opinion. Anything which doesn’t look like a backpack with a battery-pack, is now, apparently, “Air.” I don’t think that was in the original brand guidelines.

Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses — clunky, privacy-dodgy, but directionally right — had already shown where the consumer market was heading. Apple had the tech as early as 2015. They had the ecosystem. They had the chance to own it. But internal politics, CFO stinginess, and Riccio’s mis-call delayed everything by nearly a decade.

In fact, Meta’s original tie-up with Ray Ban and even its latest products work like a dream, but they make you look like a full on geek who eats alone in the cafeteria. However if you think looking like Mark Zuckerberg is going to get you a partner, you can always buy a pair of Meta Ray Bans now, and have been able to for several years.

And now? Meta leads the AR parade. Apple plays catch-up. Again.

“But Apple will get it right in the end, they always do,”

… shriek the preachers from the pulpit.

Craig’s and Tim are still trying control the shade of Walt Mossberg trying to leave Plato’s cave to regain a view of reality, but the Hounds of Baskerville and Hopium are hard to escape.

Well, not so much of late, an with AI 15 years behind schedule, “Vision Air” about 10 years behind schedule if you go back to when the Vision Department was first conceived backed in 2015, and the flop of Siri, AI, VR, AR, Car, you name it since then, Apple‘a list of “things we could have gotten right the first time” is a long litany of failures (including the “Dude where is my cell-connected Carrier Contract MacBook“) as to why that stock has languished between $167-257 this year, instead of the $400 they could easily have hit if they hadn’t been so distracted by putting make-up on their own shadows.

The Analyst Chorus: From Hype to Amnesia

We must pause to note the analyst community.

2023–24: the hosannas. “Next big platform.” “Super-cycle.” “Spatial computing revolution.”

2025: silence. Or worse, revisionism.

“It was always just a stepping stone,” - all AVP buyers, though the ages of the last 24 months

… they now mutter, pretending they didn’t declare it the Second Coming month after month, year after year, in flame wars of forums which drove yours truly to start .fyi to escape from an otherwise friendly crowd many of whom I’ve known for years, decades, but who couldn’t see through their red eyes whenever I mentioned how the AVP was a flop and to focus on other aspects of Apple’s management instead - but also to understand what Apple’s positioning and narrative being the AVP actually revealed about the incompetence of Apple’s management and product release schedule since about 2020.

So, in 2025, ”The Despairiats” began talking about being the AVP breaking out in 2026 (now moved to 2027 by those “in the know”) and by this time $4500 invested in a dead brick with a failing battery pack, in 2025, but pinning hopes on F1: The Movie somehow about to imminently result in Apple getting global rights to Formula One broadcasting and finally finding something to stream to their AVPs, even though most Americans had never of Formula One an thought is was a baby food mixing operate, until the movie). And even though Apple, although it live streams American Football and other live games, has never attempted or bothered to feed its AVP victims any live spatial footage, at all. Personally I think that’s rather rude, but it seems others enjoy the act of denial and get a kick out of it. Perhaps it’s what we are exposed to, on Vestager’s Hot Tub app (if you can find out what that means, I will doff my cap to you, which dictates how we react to spending $4-5k on a headset not declared pretty much EOL

This is why I write, for free: because memory is short, and hype cycles are engineered to be forgotten. Investors deserve receipts. And sometimes, a slap.

The Investor Lesson: Don’t Buy the Fetish

$3,500–$4,500 ski goggles? Not a mass market. Not in 2023. Not in 2025. Not until hardware, use cases, and social acceptance converge.

The techno-fetishists insisted otherwise. They were wrong. And not for the first time.

Epilogue: So, Was I Right?

“Genmoji,” Tim said, would change the world. Well, at least ,more people used them than the AVP, unlike Apple’s Other Collection of the Unlaunchables

I’m not saying I told you so (because this is just a rumour, right?).

Except I am.

I said the AVP would flop. It flopped. I said the right move was AR glasses.
I wrote several comparisons of Meta’s Ray-Ban product with what Apple had imagined internally as far back as 2015, and laid out the use car and the financial case for AR glasses.
I explained why the AVP was dead from the outset, a squandered opportunity, and waste of time and internal resources which split engineering departments down the middle.
Now Apple now pivots to AR glasses. I said the fetish for “spatial computing” was misplaced. It was.
Meanwhile, Apple’s share price stagnates, precisely because of these missteps. Stuck at a plateau, its only real innovation engine — Apple Silicon — already shipped years ago.
So yes. I was right. Again. For over 24 months. Apple got the idea right, too, when they imagined the AR version of “glasses” and decided to greenlight the idea, but dragged their heels unto 2021 to do anything about it - going down thr wrong rabbit hole, a $4500 expensive dead end journey - in the process.

But more importantly, investors should learn the lesson:

don’t buy the smoke and mirrors. don’t buy the fetish. Buy the fundamentals. don’t buy into a narrative spun by Apple that you’re “lucky” to be a beta-testing donkey for a product flop, they dropped on you, and hoovered up your money to pay for their mistake. As a consumer, you should be angry. If you’re an investor still defending the AVP, then, well, you do it your way, but frankly, you should take of your AVPs and look at the real world a little more often, perhaps.

And if you don’t believe me, go and read the 54 articles I’ve written since June this year, in which I said the AVP in its current from was DOA, Apple would revert to its original AR ambitions (albeit 10 years too late to own and dominate the market the way Jobs did with the iPods and iTunes), and 15 years too late to make Apple the pre-eminent agentic query and answer, virtual assistant, and AI leader on the planet, instead of (take your pick, because they all stole Apple’s talent,) OpenAI, Meta, Google, and XAi.

If the world, one day, does get another, lighter, better, non-battery pack needing headset which doesn’t make you head for your nearest spinal surgeon, I’ll be the first to celebrate - providing it costs under $1500. Until then, dusk has set on AVP Gen 1 and it looks like it’s now the turn of “VP AIR” which really, sounds more like a frequent flier scheme, than a use case marvel.

Let’s just hope if Apple do go down the Apple Vision Pro route again, they don’t go all-in and produce a “Pro Max” version which would look more in place in either an F-35 cockpit, or a prison camp:

Whatever the truth behind this rumour, the rumour alone is enough to prove the trajectory I described two years ago. I’m glad Mark Gurman came around, in the end.

MEANWHILE SOME PEOPLE ARE STILL ASKING:

“Mum, are we there yet?”

… echoes from the backseat of the car while over-tolerant parents tell them the journey is over but the fact is, in reality, Apple has been steering without a map and not a clue where it’s been going for several years now.

It takes a lot more than a skinny phone with a boob tube and a fat phone with a scratchable orange skin and “vapour cooling” to turn that supertanker around onto whatever the right course actually is. AAPL may be skirting with all time highs, but on hopium that AI suddenly doesn’t matter and frankly, alarmingly concocted iPhone projections based on delivery and lead times from the Apple Store online, with the promise of a new AVP last week, becoming a No-AVP this week, and definitely no AI, until at least June next year. Is that an investable thesis, or just a stock rising on a lot of hot air from a lot of rumours mainly ejected like the exhaust port of the Death Star from Star Wars, which happened - like the Aluminium Vapour Cooling System on the iPhone Pro, its weakest point.

Fingers crossed AAPL doesn’t meet the same fat and a 20% haircut if there’s even a hint of a disappointment/

.fyi comment:

Help Me Obi Wan, You’re My Only Hope

If there is a new “fresh” Apple Vision Pro , that doesn’t detract from the utter flop of the first one, the decimation of its department, the axing of its head, the movement of Vision OS into maintenance mode, and the transition of the Vision OS team onto Siri, itself then failed 6 months later because, one right doesn’t right a wrong, it just confirms the fact the first move was into a brick wall, and not even Men in Black will help you, or #FreeSiri, ignore the reality that The AVP Was A Flop, whatever they do next.

“The Long And Winding Road,” A Much Un-remembered Song From More Whimsical Times

— Tommo, London, Thursday 2nd October, 2025

X: @tommo_uk | Linkedin: Tommo UK

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RIP Apple Vision Pro? “From Hype to Headstone:” The Much Ado About Nothing I Predicted.

Tommo_UK

I have two things in to say about this catfight: