> The VisionOS crew have decided to not support OpenXR and Apple has broadly decided not to support Vulkan
Because they already have their own graphics API called Metal. Why aren't you asking Microsoft to drop DirectX and start first-party support for Vulkan?
If Apple wanted Metal to be a success then they'd need Windows devices to support it, and ideally a console too (like DirectX with Xbox).
There's a lot of bad things you can say about Vulkan's market position relative to DirectX, but it's clearly more successful than Metal. More games and work applications are written in it. I don't see what Apple gains from going their own way. Maybe Vulkan will rot by committee like OpenGL once did, but that hasn't happened yet.
Even without a standard, people will create abstractions on top so all you need to do is add support to those abstractions. If needing to conform to a standard was hampering Apple's ability to get developers to make software for their platforms they would add support. It's obviously not materially affecting them.
I think this whole thread is besides the point anyway.
VisionOS doesn't support VR gaming at a basic controller level. All it can do is the same traditional console controllers that other Apple devices support (PlayStation, Switch, Xbox, etc).
Metal vs. DirectX vs. Vulkan isn't the problem, the basic input devices and lack of interoperability with other non-graphics VR tooling/SDKs are the problem.
I know that Apple doesn't see it as a gaming device and mostly sucks at interfacing with the non-mobile gaming sphere, but if they had come out of the gate with messaging that was more like "We have built-in support for popular VR controllers, game developers can just do XYZ simple thing to port their games to VisionOS," they would have had some immediate momentum to help bolster the other select few things the device excels at.
But as it stands, nobody can make any of the kinds of abstractions you are referring to because the hardware is not capable of using the basic input devices that VR games depend on. Full stop.
Instead, prospective buyers are almost certainly comparing the Vision Pro with devices like the Meta Quest Pro and thinking "well, the Apple thing does some Apple stuff that nothing else can do, but I can't even play any occasional VR games on my Vision Pro and it's literally the most expensive headset money can buy."
The truth of the matter is that a Quest 3 can do pass-through vision, VR web content, and web browsing along with a decent selection of non-gaming apps at a tiny fraction of the cost of a Vision Pro and you don't even lose all that much due to it being less premium and advanced.
Even if we are comparing against a hypothetical $999 future Vision device where the external battery is gone and it weighs less it still doesn't compare all that well in that context. An analogy would be like if the iPhone wasn't allowed to make video calls and Android was. Maybe I don't use video calling every day but I can't justify buying a phone that doesn't have a feature like that as a concept.
IMO Apple thinks that controlling the device with just the hands and no controllers is the future. They feel like they have the iPhone all over again and that all the competitors using the metaphorical stylus and built-in keyboard are wrong. But as we found out with the iPad, sometimes a specialized input device (Apple Pencil) does serve a specific subset of customers very well to the point where it's considered a basic necessity.
Most of those games could be written to run on a toaster. Most of those games are written by people who use Unity, so they don't really care about the underlying system and may not even understand what Metal is at all.
The reality is that virtual reality and gaming technology have largely converged on DirectX and Vulkan for rendering.
I can empathize with Apple’s desire to get more adoption of Metal, but I predict it is an uphill battle to insist on it on platforms like spatial computing that is already having a very hard time to win adoption.
Because they already have their own graphics API called Metal. Why aren't you asking Microsoft to drop DirectX and start first-party support for Vulkan?