The spatial computing freelance market in 2026 is a strange shape. Apple's Vision Pro 2 didn't move the install base meaningfully — IDC's numbers put Q4 2025 shipments at around 45,000 units, reported via Slashdot's coverage of the IDC estimate. Meta confirmed in May 2026 that Quest 4 and Quest Pro 2 are pushed to 2027 — the 2026 lineup is the absence of a flagship. Reality Labs Q1 2026 revenue was down 2% year-over-year on softer Quest sales, tracked by UploadVR.
You would expect a soft market like that to compress freelance rates. It did the opposite — at the top of the rate card.
The install base is small. The enterprise rollouts are real.
The piece of context that explains the rate split: Vision Pro is an enterprise product first. Tim Cook's quote on Apple's earnings call — confirmed in coverage like TechRadar's piece on Fortune 100 adoption — put more than half of Fortune 100 companies as buyers of Vision Pro units. JigSpace, the spatial product visualization tool, logged 50,000 Vision Pro installs and 80,000 hours used by mid-2025, reported in UploadVR's enterprise breakdown. KLM, SAP, Porsche, Lowe's, EnBW, and CAE all run named enterprise pilots.