Is that an accurate way of characterizing it? I've understood The Apple Vision to be augmented reality headset, not a virtual reality headset -- that Apple intends it to be used for applications more like HoloLens was envisioned for, rather than what Quest, Index, or PSVR are currently used for.

They can call it an AR headset all they want but the thing they shipped is a vr headset with pass through

The hololens isnt used for anything, the only mainstream uses are games and pornography

Why not? Users are going to love AR adaptation of Genshin or VRChat, and Apple sure is going to do everything they could to stop it, probably up to furry-washing it.

You can watch porn all you want, and it costs less than Microsoft HoloLens did.

(Similar to Bing where Bing Maps is worse than Apple Maps, but nobody reported on it because nobody remembers it exists.)

It may well become more successful in some niche market than HoloLens (another niche product) too. But it's not a serious consumer product at $3500 (just kidding, better upgrade that non-upgradeable storage from the 0.25TB, so at least $3700) unless it can, at bare minimum, replace another expensive device (iPhone or Mac) while also doing those things better. Or if some killer app is developed. Which I wouldn't hold my breath too hard for based on their relationship with developers. A killer app like: multiple sports league partnerships which allow you to strap on AVP and be courtside/front row/etc at every game for some monthly subscription -- and all your friends who are also watching the same game are visble and audible via their Personas like they're right next to you. Suddenly, when compared to season tickets or going to 10 games a year, AVP looks great. But I am not necessarily confident that something like this will emerge for this product. Because a lot of content related stuff, which is the only 'proven' consumer use for VR, is dependent on getting content owners to play ball, and content owners don't want to help cement Apple into a dominant position in yet another industry, after seeing how cutthroat their behavior is in music and smartphone apps.

I'm aware that they intend this to be a beachhead for a future Vision Amateur or whatever which I assume will be $1500 (with trash specs, $1700 with passable ones).* However, they won't be able to sell them if developers don't embrace it. That particular egg in my humble opinion needs to be in place before the chicken of adoption will hatch.

I believe the only way Apple will make that happen is a radical change in attitude toward developers. They would need to court developers of games and owners of content and negotiate -- generously -- on terms, instead of dictating terms and clinging to the 100% control and 30% revshare they feel so deserving of.

We'll see in a couple years if I'm right!

* Honestly though, still, even at that price, can you imagine most people being eager to add another almost-$2000 device to their lives that doesn't replace another one, unless the device does some serious life-improving stuff? And I don't see how the price gets any lower than that, even if Apple budged on margins which is very out of character.

But not VR optimized ones. GP’s not talking about flat stuff. HoloLens was also DOA for different reasons(chiefly narrow FOV I think)

You can play all sorts of video games from Apple Arcade, XBox/PS5, Mac, PC etc.

There's loads of options courtesy of apps like MirrorPlay.

And this is the Vision Pro not Vision. So the mainstream price will be significantly cheaper.

Are the games 2D or 3D? I'm not a big gamer but I'm curious.

Almost everything is 2D because of the iPad support.

There are some launch 3D games but most are being built/ported right now.