Apple’s Vision Pro Era Begins. Will Consumers Buy In?

The first shipments of Apple’s Vision Pro—a $3,499 virtual-reality headset that places digital content around the user’s environment—will be arriving Friday. The headset quickly sold out of its initial availability after going up for preorder earlier this month.

Apple hasn’t disclosed how many headsets it has sold, but the number is projected to be between 160,000 to 180,000 units, according to TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Those figures are a far cry from the roughly one million preorders that the Apple Watch saw on its first sales day in 2015.

The primary challenge for Apple in the coming years will be getting mainstream consumers excited for a new type of device that so far has been relegated mostly to niche gaming circles.

“This is a different kind of product release for Apple," said Grant Anderson, chief executive of Mirrorscape, maker of augmented reality tabletop games that will be coming to the Vision Pro. “It’s not like a phone that people already had or a watch." Augmented reality projects digital images into a user’s real world.

To distinguish it from what has come before, Apple has avoided terms like virtual reality or the metaverse, which Mark Zuckerberg championed a few years ago after renaming Facebook to Meta Platforms. Instead, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook has championed “spatial computing" as the next frontier of devices.

“It’s a new language," said Bertrand Nepveu, who previously worked at Apple on the team building the Vision Pro and is now an investor in startups in this emerging area. “It’s like when the Mac first came out. People had to learn how to use a mouse. It will take a bit of time for the Vision Pro to also find what works and what doesn’t. It’s a Mac moment."

When Apple first launched the Macintosh in 1984, it offered early consumers the first opportunity to buy an accessible home computer and kick-started a new era of technology.

More important than initial sales for Apple will be finding the third-party apps that will be enticing enough to draw consumers to the new platform.

Many developers are excited about Apple’s entrance into the market, which is almost entirely dominated by Meta’s line of Quest headsets. Having another powerful player to play off the current leader will offer a healthier market for app developers.

“It’s not good for an ecosystem to have only one platform like that," said Devin Reimer, chief executive of new virtual-reality gaming studio AstroBeam who sold his previous VR game studio to Google in 2017.

Some major companies such as Disney and Microsoft have announced their intentions to develop apps for the headset at the outset. Apple is on track to have more than 200 apps specifically made for the Vision Pro, according to Appfigures, an app analytics firm. Because Apple made it easy for developers to port over existing apps from the iPhone and iPad, the company said that it would have more than one million compatible apps to choose from in the Vision Pro’s App Store at launch.

This initial app count is another major contrast to the launch of the Apple Watch. For the smartwatch’s launch nearly 10 years ago, Apple worked hard to make sure that it could claim a robust catalog of more than 3,000 apps. Since then, though, it has become clear that the Apple Watch’s success has been more dependent on adding new health-tracking features than third-party apps.

Unfortunately for Apple, this need for app makers is coming at a time when Apple’s relationship with developers may be at a record low. After a decade of massive growth with the iPhone as a software platform, many app developers have soured on the company’s app distribution model, which for many developers entails a cut for Apple of as much as 30%.

Large mobile app developers such as Epic Games and Spotify have waged legal battles against the iPhone maker in recent years. Those battles have been heating up as Apple’s response to new laws and court orders has been called “outrageous" by some software makers.

Some of the largest app developers from the iPhone era have been hesitant to jump on board to develop for the Vision Pro. Top media streaming apps Netflix, YouTube and Spotify have all declined to develop a new app for the Vision Pro at launch, though they left open the possibility of potentially developing for the platform in the future.

Some virtual-reality developers said Apple’s approach ignores what the industry has learned over the past decade. While games have emerged as the most popular use case for headsets, Apple has underplayed that kind of application in early demonstrations.

The Vision Pro’s lack of physical controllers will also be a major hindrance for existing developers to smoothly port over their existing games. To date, most of these kinds of games have been built for physical controllers for users to interact with virtual worlds, while the Vision Pro relies on hand gestures and eye movements for user interaction.

“The majority of VR games don’t support hand tracking," said Denny Unger, chief executive officer of Cloudhead Games, the maker of popular virtual-reality games such as Pistol Whip.

“Apple is omitting hundreds of VR titles. I worry about the content path for Apple."

Write to Aaron Tilley at aaron.tilley@wsj.com