Apple crucially needs to get three things right for this headset to work out:
1) It needs to be cheap as hell - actually cheap. Aside from a small group of enthusiasts (gaming and 3d ...video...) the typical Apple user does not spend hundreds of bucks on 3d headsets, let alone thousands. I think this will already break that headset's neck, they need to hand it out like candy but the Apple brand cannot do that due to the optics. No pun intended.
2) They need an incredible content-incentive to convince the normies to spend even that tiny amount of money on it. Otherwise in the very best scenario it ends up like Apple Arcade.
3) The quality of this headset needs to be beyond anything we've seen. Sorta like releasing the first iPhone if the first iPhone was the iPhone X. I am imagining something you can wear out in public for augmented reality. If it's the typical "brick" you put on your face and use exclusively at home it's dead on arrival. I have had multiple of these and they all eventually turned out to be too inconvenient to use day to day.
They will have to sell 1 Million to recoup the investment, not 400,000.
They better not try to recoup the investment over the next few years, let alone this year. At more than few hundred bucks there isn't a chance to see widespread adoption. Are they making a headset for the 1% or do they want everyone to have one like it's an iPhone?
Apple needs this to be a monetary loss short-term and even mid-term. Nobody is going to question that in 10 years when we all walk around with the 5th iteration of that headset like they're sunglasses. That's what Apple has to aim for here.
Millions of people wear glasses.
People don't wear prescription glasses by choice. Sunglasses aren't commonly seen in bad weather either. Apple's headset needs to do more than overcoming the inconvenience of wearing glasses and having some neat but ultimately gadget-y tech built in.
im struggling to find a use case for this
Think of a nth gen headset many years down the road that you can wear like sunglasses and it tracks your eyes and allows you to scroll through your feed that way. Sorta like a hands-free iPhone. Siri in 10 years should be able to understand us instantly with "AI" assisted processing allowing us to interact with this kind of tech by voice and eye movement exclusively, integrating it seamlessly into our daily lives.
That's my long-term vision for this. The first generations won't be great and it will struggle. That's a given. If it's not Apple that does it, someone else will come along. It's unavoidable that we'll have more and more of that kind of tech, that's eventually implanted, or worn like contact lenses, for example. We are still decades away from this, but unless climate change and the already beginning famines stop the acceleration of tech development, many of us will still be around and perhaps think back to 2023 and that silly clunky gadget-y Apple headset... and perhaps wondering how we went from that silly old time to ...2055?... so quickly.
For many people alive today commercial airplane travel didn't exist in their childhood. And I am sure plenty of them thought they'd never travel by airplane. That's us, right now, we are wondering about some headset that's just one of the many things that will help create a future we will be able to see with our own eyes. Whether you see a use case now in 2023 is of no consequence.