Evidence through November 30, 2025 shows that Apple Vision Pro has remained a niche, short‑lived product rather than a widely adopted, enduring platform.

Lack of mainstream traction

• IDC estimates that Apple shipped only about 400,000 Vision Pros in 2024, versus 5.6 million Meta headsets, and notes that premium headsets over $1,000 (including Vision Pro) account for just 5–6% of the market and are largely bought by enterprises and enthusiasts, not the mass consumer market. (theverge.com)
• Business and market reports repeatedly describe Vision Pro’s reception as lukewarm and the device as a niche product: for example, Jefferies cited a “lukewarm reception” when discussing Apple’s outlook, and broader AR/VR headset shipments are projected to decline ~12% in 2025, reinforcing that this category has not gone mainstream. (investing.com)
• An August 2025 report notes that Vision Pro is “struggling to gain traction,” with fewer than 1 million units sold in the U.S. after roughly a year and a half, despite OS and app improvements. (benzinga.com) These numbers are far from the scale associated with a mainstream Apple platform (hundreds of millions of users).

Brief relevance and signs of fading prominence

• By April 2024 Apple had already cut shipment forecasts for Vision Pro due to cooling demand in its core U.S. market, signaling that initial hype did not translate into sustained broad interest. (technewsday.com)
• In 2025, multiple reports indicate Apple has scaled back or paused development of major follow‑on headsets: Reuters, summarizing Bloomberg reporting, says Apple halted work on a next‑generation Vision Pro and a cheaper N100 model to shift resources toward AI smart glasses, citing “declining momentum” and limited mainstream content. (reuters.com) MacRumors likewise reports that development of both the lighter “Vision Air” and a redesigned Vision Pro has been paused, with only an incremental M5 refresh planned, and explicitly notes the product is still unlikely to enjoy mass appeal. (macrumors.com)
• Analyst roadmaps for the M5 refresh forecast only 150,000–200,000 units shipped in 2025 and describe Vision Pro as likely to “remain a niche product,” essentially a stopgap to maintain minimal market presence rather than a growing mass platform. (macrumors.com) Meanwhile, French‑language coverage notes that production of the original M2 model was stopped in 2025 due to disappointing sales, further underscoring its short commercial life. (fr.wikipedia.org)

Synthesis

• By late 2025, Vision Pro has not achieved mainstream adoption by any reasonable metric (shipments, user base, or app ecosystem scale) and is widely characterized as niche and struggling to gain traction.
• Apple’s strategic pivot away from expanding the Vision Pro headset line and toward smart glasses, combined with very modest projected shipments and the end of production for the initial model, supports the view that Vision Pro’s window of prominence has been relatively brief and is waning, rather than expanding into a dominant, long‑lived platform.

Given this evidence, Sack’s normalized prediction—that Vision Pro would fail to gain sustained mainstream traction and would fade rather than become a broadly adopted, durable platform—is substantially borne out by the data available as of November 30, 2025.