Apple Vision Pro and the metaverse economy

The Apple Vision Pro is launching tomorrow and the Financial Revolutionist team is not buying a headset for review. The whopping $3,499 price tag—not including sales tax!—felt like an inefficient use of company resources: money better put to use for in-person events or proprietary data generation. 

We’re far from the only ones holding back on an Apple Vision Pro setup. Crucially, as WIRED reported, many app developers are adopting a “wait-and-see” approach before working on the new visionOS system. That’s because developers expect tepid sales numbers for the Vision Pro due to its price inaccessibility. 

“It's amazing tech, but it's also very clearly a development kit,” AR/VR developer Brielle Garcia told WIRED. “The price is way too high for consumers, and there's no real killer apps for them yet.”

In his consumer review of the Vision Pro, Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief at The Verge, echoes this sentiment, positing that the headset functions as a sandbox for app developers. The hardware is too uncanny to otherwise justify a public launch—featuring eerie, foggy human eyes on the front thanks to its EyeSight feature, as well as a headband that always messes up your hair and fails to adequately support the Vision Pro’s bulky weight. As Patel writes: 

The other way to look at the Vision Pro is that… the technology to build the true AR glasses [Apple] has long hinted at is simply not there — so the Vision Pro represents something like a simulator or a developer kit. A dream factory for people to build apps and meaningful use cases for the imagined hardware yet to come: true optical AR glasses that let you share digital experiences with other people. In that framework, this Vision Pro is the hardware Apple can ship right now to get everyone thinking about these ideas while it pours all those resources into the hardware it wants to build. Maybe!

In other words, if the Vision Pro is the best that Apple—a tech behemoth with a $2.85T market cap and a long history of operating at the cutting edge—can do at this juncture, then the Vision Pro is the best that AR/VR developers can work with. But, beyond the hardware’s priciness and tech flaws, developers’ “meh!” response to its launch probably has equally as much to do with (1) the metaverse’s fundamentally fractured nature as well as (2) Apple’s arguably monopolistic tendencies. The Vision Pro will lie fallow as a barren walled garden in the meantime. This has significant effects on the fintech industry’s potential future in the metaverse.

Fractures in the metaverse

The FR has covered the metaverse’s ups and its downs: from Meta’s hopes and its implications for fintech startups to public disinterest in metaverse initiatives. Undergirding these episodes is the reality that the metaverse is being built piecemeal by competing tech giants who are uninterested in substantive interoperability among their respective silos of hardware and software. 

The Apple Vision Pro, in other words, can’t coexist with Meta’s Quest headsets. In fact, it can’t even synchronize meaningfully with other Vision Pro headsets—a flaw, according to The Verge’s Patel, that makes the Vision Pro a uniquely lonely experience. Unable to tilt or broadcast the headset’s screen to share its contents (a picture, a meme, a movie) the way one can a phone, tablet, or laptop, Vision Pro users largely occupy augmented reality alone: removed from the socializing power of other modern, albeit flawed, technologies. (This remains true as long as multi-user app developers stay financially and operationally disincentivized from experimenting with visionOS—more on that in a minute.)

This walled-garden approach makes it especially hard for fintechs to penetrate the metaverse. In addition to growing disinterest from Gen Z in virtual commercial experiences (which we covered here), the fixed costs of entering several metaverse ecosystems simultaneously, each with their own coding languages and hardware specifications, may be too high for fintechs to justify such an experimental cost. Following in developers’ footsteps, fintechs, too, may opt for a “wait-and-see” approach, eventually dedicating their resources to operate in the predicted winner’s metaverse, and potentially expanding outward from there. But these metaverse winners probably won’t be easy to work with, which brings us to these systems’ litigious overlords. 

Apple’s antitrust woes

Apple hasn’t made much effort to woo developers into working with visionOS, a developer told WIRED. “They want us to jump through a lot of hoops to even just be in the conversation of maybe being able to develop this kind of thing,” the developer said. 

Such standoffishness doesn’t exactly repair Apple’s relationship with developers, which is already on the rocks due to its exorbitant—and legally contentious—fees for App Store payments. 

The computing giant announced last month that it would charge developers up to 27% for using non-Apple payment providers; this comes after legal battles with Epic Games forced Apple to open up its App Store payments to outside processors. Apple previously charged developers up to 35% for using Apple’s payment system. 

We should probably expect the major app developers already working with Apple on visionOS to also be using Apple’s payments rails. It’s unlikely that other payments players can beat Apple out as long as these new non-Apple-payment-provider fees stick around. The walled garden has a single bank, in other words, if we stick with the metaphor. 

The takeaway

The Vision Pro will remain a beta (almost anemic) piece of hardware for a while. The developers who could give it more oomph have little financial incentive to do so. Fintechs interested in expanding their digital footprint to new forms of hardware need peripheral vision, keeping their eyes on Apple’s future in the metaverse in addition to other players’. That’s in addition to considering the metaverse’s existential future tout court.

Source: OMDIA

In the meantime, some financial institutions may continue to dabble in the metaverse as a PR stunt or form of experimentation. Tech research and advisory group Omdia expects VR headsets to rebound after a low in 2025, which may encourage fintechs and payments providers to start making some medium-term strategies.

But, maybe above all else, ask yourself this: If you’re not pining for a $3,499 isolationist “iPad for your face,” then why would others?