How the Vision Pro Rollout Inflamed Tensions at Apple (opens in new tab)

> Jobs saw the Apple Store not so much as a retail outlet but as a church for evangelizing to the unconverted. He wanted the world to know that Apple’s simple but powerful tools would give people access to whatever stirred their passions—photos, songs, movies—and help them create these things on their own.

I don’t know that sales training alone could save the Vision Pro. After the device is sold, people still have to want to use it.

I bought one a couple months ago. During the in-store demo things seemed fine and the new head strap seemed like a big improvement. However, the demo is still very guided and doesn’t necessarily cover real-world usage. Most other devices in the store are simply available for people to play with, so they can try whatever they want.

Once I got it home I couldn’t deep dive as much as I would with other products, because the eye fatigue was very real. Day 2 I didn’t even use it, because my eyes were still tired from day 1. What I did try wasn’t a smooth experience. Window management was tedious and finicky, widgets didn’t persist between sessions like they were supposed to, clarity was a problem where some things seemed tack sharp while other things seemed blurry, and I would rather just plug it into the wall as the battery pack was more annoying than useful. By day 4 or 5 the novelty had already worn off. By day 6 I was ready to return it. I didn’t even keep it for the full return windows to maximize the things I could try. I had no desire to put it on and had to work up the motivation to put it I just to do the factory reset.

When I went in for the return the employee processing the return seemed genuinely thankful that I was returning it, as she said so many people were getting stuck with them. I was all ready to give my feedback on why I was returning it, and instead the reception was more like, “of course you’re returning this, everyone should.”

I once read when the iPhone was being developed that they brought a version in for Jobs to review and after using it for a few minutes he calmly said, “this isn’t a product yet.” I guess the lack of his signature anger spoke volumes and scared them more than the yelling. This was how I felt about the Vision Pro. It’s not a product yet. It doesn’t know what it wants to be and doesn’t feel like something I want to use. Even just for watching a movie, it was tedious to get going and unpleasant to sit there for several hours locked in.

> Across several stores, salespeople reported doing dozens of demos without closing a single sale. “We sell maybe one a week,” Barrett said in late May, two weeks after the union had voted to authorize a strike in order to make a final push for a contract.

> “Uh, none a week,” Billy Jarboe, a coworker, corrected her. “If we do a return, we’re negative.”