Agreed, I want to understand the purpose of this but it just does not make any sense given the pretty wild asking price. What exactly is the purpose? Is it the integration with other Apple products that is supposed to be the big selling point?

It just strikes me as a very expensive way to do things you can already do on other devices, though maybe I am just missing something here.

Being charitable, I still consider it to be a dev kit for a device that Apple are still working out. They recognise that AR is a future, but they can only stake their claim in that future if they do the rn'd right now.

And that's what Vision Pro is.

Apple don't really know what it is in the same way that they never could have predicted the popularity of the iPhone. They've put the hardware out there in the world, and are waiting for the devs to show them what it can do, and the early adopting customers to show them what they want it to do.

One thing that does seem clear to me though is that they're banking on it being the Mac replacement that's running an OS that's as locked down as iOS. It seems that to Apple people haven't taken the iPad in the same way they have Mac because the screen is smaller, therefore, offer a functionally unlimited screen and that's a winner, right? Except the screen size is only one factor. The major factor (certainly to me) is how relatively locked down iPadOS is compared to macOS, and how you have to jump through hoops to do things on an iPad that are incredibly simple on a Mac. There's no way that VisionOS is going to be as open as macOS, so it'll only ever be a companion to a Mac.