There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. I joked during the WWDC keynote that "Vision Pro" sounds like a health insurance plan.
Conspiracy theory: a common criticism of Tim Cook is that he has no vision; now he does, literally.
Incidentally, I did think that macOS Sonoma was a fine name.
I wasn't in Cupertino for WWDC and haven't tried Vision Pro. From what I've seen and heard, it does look very cool. I'm excited by the concept. Indeed, I'm much more excited about Vision Pro than I am about iPad (not very) or Apple Watch (not at all). I feel that iPad is just a stunted laptop, and Watch is high tech snake oil. In contrast, Vision Pro has the potential to open up a whole new paradigm of personal computing.
Will a headset be practical? I don't know. It's far too early to judge. The fake eyeballs are creepy though. I'm not sure about that design choice.
It has been confirmed by Apple that Vision Pro will support Safari extensions! Therefore, it appears to be possible for me to port StopTheMadness to visionOS. (I watched some WWDC videos in which the Apple engineers referred to it as "xrOS".) I haven't made any decisions yet, but I am thinking about applying for a Vision Pro development kit, depending on availability and pricing.
My main concern about Vision Pro development is recouping the cost. (I wear prescription glasses for reading and computing, so that may be an additional expense.) And Apple handled the Apple silicon developer transition kit somewhat badly. Hopefully they learned their lesson from that! Apple has stated that the consumer price of Vision Pro will be $3500 (not including prescription lenses), so I assume that I would end up paying approximately that cost as a developer.
I read an article by developer David Smith that was mostly fine but included one section that I found disturbing:
I do suspect that most of the economic realities of the App Store will carry over to this platform. That there will be a rush towards the bottom in regards to pricing and a general user expectation that software should be free (or nearly free).
If Smith's suspicion is true, then I have no interest in developing for Vision Pro. It's never really been viable for little indie developers like me to "make it up in volume" on iPhone. There are over a billion potential customers, but turning potential customers into actual customers is extremely difficult. Unlike BigCos, we don't have giant advertising and marketing budgets. We don't have the news media following and covering our every move. We have word of mouth, which is effective but limited. We need sustainable software prices to survive. One of the best business decisions I ever made was to charge separately for StopTheMadness Mobile. If I had given it away for free to previous Mac customers, as a "universal purchase", I doubt that I'd still be in business today.
I feel that this new platform is an opportunity for a pricing reset. The initial price of the product makes a mass consumer market unlikely in the near future. Compare with iPhone, which started at $499 and quickly dropped down to $199, prices that were much more affordable to consumers than Vision Pro. We can state definitively that not a single Vision Pro buyer will be able to plead poverty. Thus, I would implore developers to charge separately for their visionOS apps, and charge a higher, sustainable price. That's certainly my intention. It's the only way I can pay for Vision Pro development. If I could break even on the device by selling approximately 500 app units (after income tax and the "Apple tax"), then the investment might be worth the risk.
I've seen a specious argument going around, made by a number of people, claiming that Vision Pro isn't really expensive, because the initial price of the Macintosh in 1984 was $2500, which would be $7500 today, adjusted for inflation, and the Vision Pro's $3500 is less than half of $7500. But that's not how inflation works! As disproof of the argument, look at the price of an iMac today: $1300. That's actually massive "deflation" from 1984.
You might insist that the Mac Pro ought to be the analogous machine from today rather than the iMac, but that wouldn't help the argument at all, because the Mac Pro starts at $7000 (without a display!), which is indisputably exorbitant, out of reach for almost everyone, even software developers. (I would remind you that the Mac Pro started at only $2500 in 2006 and experienced massive price inflation in the relatively short time since then, especially with the 2019 model.)
Inflation is an aggregate. It doesn't affect every product equally. Some prices go up, some go way up, some stay the same, and some go down. Consumer electronics have achieved mass markets by reducing prices. That's one of the reasons the Mac sells vastly more units today than in 1984. And it's also one of the reasons that the 1984 Mac was a much bigger hit than its predecessor the Lisa, which cost $10,000. (Perhaps in 40 years we'll watch a documentary about how Apple secretly sent a bunch of Vision Pro units to a landfill.)
Inflation can be useful for short-term comparisons, but it's less useful for historical comparisons, especially when you arbitrarily select a single product for comparison. The entire economy, the "basket of goods" available, changes over time. In 1984, the only option for personal computing was a desktop computer. They didn't have smartphones, smart watches, smart TVs, tablets, laptop computers, etc. Some people today have every single one of those products in their homes. When the only option was a desktop computer, you could afford to invest more in that one option, because you didn't need money left over to pay for other computing devices. The "smart headset" is unlikely to be a replacement for any of the other personal computing devices, at least not in the near future. It's a supplement, and thus the costs of all the other devices have to be considered along with the cost of the headset. Another consideration with regard to inflation is how much wages have increased—or not increased!— over time, relative to other prices. A mass market depends on the disposable income of the masses.
The Mac has always been and continues to be a legitimate business expense, whether the Mac is purchased by a business or purchased by an individual with personal business in mind. As much as Apple has tried to hype Mac gaming in recent years, the empirical reality doesn't match the hype. The Mac is in large part a device for "getting stuff done". While the entertainment possibilities of Vision Pro are obvious, the business case for Vision Pro is much less obvious. The basic practicality and utility remains to be seen. So justifying the price of the device as something that "pays for itself" is much more difficult. I hope that will be the case for me personally, but it only makes business sense because I'm a software developer who can directly monetize the device.
Vision Pro is very expensive. Let's not try to pretend it isn't. No amount of hand-waving about "inflation" will change that fact, or change the perception. If you're wealthy enough that $3500 doesn't give you pause, that's great for you, but don't expect everyone else to feel the same way.