The Vision Pro's failings are IMHO not software or hardware related but a poorly executed platform strategy for content. Apple's reflex to build walled gardens has crippled the effort. And it's not the first time. Their Apple TV strategy was held back for years as well. Great hardware. Very cheap. You can plug it into any TV. It's not a bad game console even. But it lacked games. And streaming TV channels. And for a long time also streaming content. Apple fixed that eventually but Apple TV remains a distant competitor to more main stream platforms such as Netflix, which works on just about anything. Just like Youtube, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, Disney, and all the rest. Apple TV at this point is an also ran that apparently is barely profitable. A few nice TV series but very much a niche player. The Apple TV hardware is more or less irrelevant at this point. And despite the name, Apple never made a TV or much of a dent into conquering the living room.
Macs are great for gaming in terms of hardware. But other gaming platforms dominate the market. And Apple's walled garden approach is so effective that Steam's proton doesn't work on its platforms (so far). And its attempt to convince game developers to use Apple specific SDKs like Metal and build platforms are not really making any dent in the overall gaming market, which now eclipses Hollywood in terms of revenue and budgets. From a developer point of view it remains a highly crippled platform. And the Apple tax isn't helping.
Seen against this background, the Vision Pro is a strategic content failure. Very few 3D games work on it. Very little new 3D content is developed for it. Apple's insistence on our way or the highway continues to have developers preferring the highway. There are a few decades worth of back catalog of VR games, 3D movies, etc. Most of which flat out won't work on the Vision Pro or aren't licensed for it. They could fix that but that would require investing in content/licensing deals, compatibility/emulation, etc. And by making the core product so expensive, it basically became a niche product. And without content that remains a hard sell. It does not make sense for productions with hundreds of millions of budget (i.e. most 3D games and movies) to be targeting such a niche platform. And it does not make sense for end users to buy the product if there is no good content and if most of the good content is never released for it.
It's a very fixable problem. Valve is leading the way with Proton currently. That strategy is very portable to macs and the Vision pro. There is very little technical reason to stop that from working. And Apple has been chipping away at their own portability kit. But they are so far not really committing to it fully. They should be filling the Apple store with decades worth of great content that just works on Apple HW. As it is there is only a relatively small collection of old content that has been ported.
Re: Apple TV (the studios and the content)... it is a bit of mystery: it's very worthy and good - arguably one of Tim Cook's finest achievements - but not a runaway success in a very competitive post-TV market. Steve Jobs shepherded Pixar into the world, and I'm sure he'd consider Apple TV (again the content arm) a comparable achievement.
Steve Jobs called the original Apple TV a "hobby", and, similarly for now there isn't any pressure for it to massively grow.
I wonder what Apple TV would look like if they didn’t have Ted Lasso to put out during peak Covid. That’s really their only large mainstream success and in my estimation that success was largely a product of circumstance.
I love their SciFi material but two seasons of severance in three years won’t keep people subscribed. The only reason I have Apple TV for more than a month or two out of the year is due to the bundle plan math working out with family sharing.
In no particular order:
Silo For All Mankind Tehran Foundation (“meh-ish, but watchable”) Slow Horses Murderbot Shrinking …
I don't watch much of it but I do think Apple TV could end up a big winner in the TV wars. The shows they put out are quality and you know they are going to be renewed unlike a Netflix. It seems the strategy is to go for HBO's old position as the king of quality but that is built over decades.
It’s not the “walled garden” that’s preventing Valve to write Proton for Mac, it’s the lack of Vulcan support. Apple pushed to its own Metal framework when they deprecated OpenGl, which is probably great for performance, but outright denying support for Vulkan was a killer blow for games.
If Macs were "great" for gaming people would be buying them for gaming.
You can release a phone with desktop-strength hardware running Ubuntu Touch and people will wouldn't buy it to play games because exceedingly few games are made for it
Software support is vital here, you can't just say that if the hardware is good then people would buy it. What good is it if you can't use it?
This is exactly why the hardware + software vertical integration philosophy is fundamentally retarded. What it essentially means for N hardware vendors to each have their own software platform is that as an application developer, instead of having to develop ONE application, you have to develop N applications. Imagine if Apple hardware just used Linux and macOS / iOS / whateverthefuckOS was just a desktop environment project like Plasma / GNOME / COSMIC. You could still keep the exact same particularities / UX flows / ease of use that people expect from Apple products, AND get free access to the wealth of software and content which exists for Linux and ALSO Windows (because of wine).