If businesses don't buy these in bulk, this will be an Apple Newton v2. Likely to be uncomfortable/look stupid and be stupidly overpriced as well for what you get.
I'm sure Apple is in a much better position than in the mid 90s so they can probably absorb bad sales and these headsets will shrink down soon enough and get killer apps and get cheaper so the real question is who's going to build the Android of VR and take the non-walled garden market?
Meta Quest. It even runs on Android. For that matter, so does Magic Leap 2. If they deign to do so all the "usual suspects" who make Android phones could make Android-based VR headsets.
As much as the media has been obsessed with the train wreck that is Horizon Worlds, it's a well kept secret that Meta Quest has an app store that works like the app store on a game console. You can even sideload phone, tablet and TV apps and they "just work" most of the time.
There is no working "metaverse" and even meaningful multiplayer games are thin on the ground, but no shortage of good single-player games and what I'd call game-adjacent apps.
It's little recognized that XR apps are highly portable because they are almost always based on portable frameworks like Unity. In fact, just about every XR headset supports WebXR which makes it outright easy to make web-based virtual worlds
these work with desktop, phones and tablets as well as most of the AR and VR headsets. All it takes is that you "think different" and choose to live life outside the app store.
When was the last time Apple’s success depended on business bulk purchase? Apple didn’t become the highest market cap company in the world selling expensive phones to businesses in bulk orders.
Luckily the fanatics don’t care about looking stupid as proven with the wireless ear buds. There’s also probably a large enough fanatic culture where this will be a niche product for a generation or two. While they claim it’s the best selling headset or something.
I'm sure Apple is in a much better position than in the mid 90s so they can probably absorb bad sales and these headsets will shrink down soon enough and get killer apps and get cheaper so the real question is who's going to build the Android of VR and take the non-walled garden market?