alt Hacker NewsIt no more smells of desperation than when Apple contributed modern ScreenCaptureKit support to OBS Studio. They want great experiences for their own platforms and sometimes that means reaching out to other projects.
It's true that the Vision Pro hasn't seen the uptake that Apple's other platforms did at launch, like the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, etc. — but it's nearsighted to think that Apple can't play a long game. It has the patience (and money) to play it all the way to the eventual release of their glasses; by that time, the platform will already have plenty of fantastic software ported from iOS and, eventually, other platforms through ventures like this.
I think there is "playing the long game" and there is "flogging a dead horse".
I still can't believe that both apple and meta bet the farm on VR and screwed up so spectacularly. It was fairly clear that VR was never going to be mainstream for the same reasons that 3D movies and TVs vanished after all that fanfare and marketing a few years ago: people don't want to wear the glasses, and they don't want to pay extra either. We've been there and tried this - people are happy with 2D screens and don't see any real benefits of 3D glasses/headsets worth paying for (...apart from the nerdfactor).
Sure there might be some sort of market for "smart glasses" and people are continually releasing various iterations of those (and I'd be up for a pair too FWIW), but if the vision pro is any indication of what the tech is capable of today, we're a very very long way away from normal-glasses-style form factor units (i.e. size, weight, battery life, discreetness, price, nausea etc).
Tl;Dr - nice try doing something new, but if I were an apple investor I'd prefer they went back to what they knew and not waste further billions upon billions "playing the long game" on a dead-end because they can't accept they made a mistake.