The first thought I had, as I put on the Apple Vision Pro headset, was that I was somehow going to fail at virtual reality. For 20 minutes I’d watched as people with appointments ahead of me at the Apple store pinched the air, interacting with invisible stimuli. They looked ridiculous in the manner of mature adults trying to adopt new technology – all right, Grandma – which triggered my second, even more geriatric thought: what if there was a fire while you were in one of these things and you didn’t notice and burned to death?

In fact, the most startling thing about the release of Apple’s new virtual reality headset in the US last week was the nationwide scramble to book appointments for a demo, and with it, the opportunity to spend almost $4,000. The Vision Pro won’t be available in the rest of the world for some time and, while Apple hasn’t released sales figures, pre-orders were said to be somewhere between 160,000 and 180,000 during the first pre-order weekend.

At my local store, in a relatively tourist-free part of New York, the Apple associate fitting my headset told me they were selling roughly 200 Vision Pros a day, a good proportion of them to foreign visitors.........

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