Reprinted from TidBITS by permission; reuse governed by Creative Commons license BY-NC-ND 3.0. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary on Apple and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the entire TidBITS archive, visit http://www.tidbits.com/ Vision Pro Value Poll Results: $500-$1000 or Nothing Adam Engst Last week, we asked [1]how much you would pay for an Apple Vision Pro, knowing what you know now about it and its capabilities. This was not a referendum on whether the Vision Pro's price is unreasonable but an attempt to get people to think beyond techno-lust and consider how much value they would receive from the Vision Pro. To put the decision in context, I provided six possibilities for the poll, bookended by the extremes of 'I ordered one' and 'I wouldn't buy one.' The remaining answers set price bands that roughly match the costs of existing Apple products, letting respondents compare the perceived value of the Vision Pro to familiar devices. The poll drew 257 responses, which is low compared to some of our recent polls, suggesting that many TidBITS readers have sufficiently little opinion about the Vision Pro that they weren't even interested in hazarding a guess. Here are the results. The top two responses had little in common. 37% of respondents said they would pay between $500 and $1000 for a Vision Pro today, suggesting that they considered it equivalent in value to a basic iPhone, iPad, or good external display for a Mac. That was my vote'I can't see the Vision Pro making me more productive on an everyday basis, but it might be sufficiently helpful when traveling to justify paying that much. However, just slightly behind that answer, with 35% of the votes, was 'I wouldn't buy one.' That suggests to me that many people see the Vision Pro as a solution looking for a problem. Six years ago, I reviewed the Royole Moon, an $800 '3D mobile theater,' and while it was interesting to test, I couldn't imagine using it for anything real and was happy to send it back (see '[2]The Dark Side of the Royole Moon,' 25 April 2018). Although the Vision Pro is vastly more impressive than the Royole Moon, for many people, it may not feel any more useful. Our third and fourth vote-getters also clumped. 13% of respondents said they felt the Vision Pro was equivalent in value to an iPhone Pro, iPad Pro, or Mac and thus justified a price between $1000 and $3500. I realize that's a wide band'I might consider one if it was $1200 but would giggle at a $3300 price tag'but it feels like these people would buy a Vision Pro if Apple could get the price down to something closer to a MacBook Air. On the other side of the price range, 9% of respondents felt the Vision Pro would be worth only between $100 and $500, placing it alongside the Apple Watch in value. It's possible that this choice, like the Under $100 answer that received only 3% of the votes, didn't receive many votes because people couldn't bring themselves to value such a significant piece of technology so low. It must be worth more than $500, right? Or they consider the Vision Pro to be more of a novelty. Also, at the bottom of the vote tally with 3% were the seven or eight people who had already ordered a Vision Pro. Part of my reason for running this poll is to get a sense of what kind of Vision Pro coverage we should be providing. With so few TidBITS readers jumping on the Vision Pro bandwagon, I can't see reporting on minor updates to visionOS (we're up to [3]version 1.0.3 now). Most people won't care about such details. We do plan to publish some additional perspectives about what it's like to use the Vision Pro, but I'll focus most of my Vision Pro efforts on TidBITS Talk discussions. If there's some Vision Pro coverage you'd like to see, please suggest it in the comments, and if I think it would be of broad interest, I'll see if I can find someone to write it. References Visible links 1. https://talk.tidbits.com/t/tidbits-poll-how-much-would-you-pay-for-a-vision-pro/26682?u=ace 2. https://tidbits.com/2018/04/25/the-dark-side-of-the-royole-moon/ 3. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT214071 Hidden links: 4. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2024/02/Vision-Pro-value-poll-results.png .