Nah I'll give them credit for that one, the dual knit band is what the Vision Pro should have shipped with in the first place. The original designs were the baffling ones, you had to choose between a fancy knitted band without any top support, or a cheap band with top support, but now you get the best of both in one. Which you really want for such a heavy headset.

I don't think it's baffling; the original band was just Apple making the same kind of fumble that Coke made with New Coke: they assumed that because something is well-received in quick one-time demos, that means that people will also like it over longer exposures.

If you don't know the backstory: New Coke had a sweeter formula than Coke Classic. And, as the original "Pepsi challenge" [1975] demonstrated a decade prior to New Coke [1985], people tend to prefer a sweeter drink when they're only being given a 15ml sip of it. New Coke's initial user testing was essentially a "New Coke challenge" — giving people 15ml sips of Coke Classic vs New Coke — and this led them to believe that this sweeter formula would be popular. But as demonstrated by later attempted replications of the "Pepsi challenge", the preference for sweeter drinks goes away when people get a full mouthful of the beverage; let alone when they're handed a full glass to drink as they please. It never seemingly occurred to Coke to do another round of "full-scale" testing, with testers being given full glasses of New Coke to drink (perhaps with ice; perhaps with food; perhaps chilled, perhaps warm... etc), before green-lighting the formula for production.

Same thing seemed to happen to Apple with the Vision Pro's original band. You don't tend to notice the strain of headset's weight pressing down onto your face at first; it only becomes apparent after ~10-15 minutes of use. It was likely that both their user-testing sessions, and their shareholder demo sessions, were short. (The final retail demo they walk you through is certainly short!)

You wouldn't think that this could be true of the Vision Pro, because it was a very-clearly dogfooded product: Apple made this thing first-and-foremost for Apple engineers, to allow their hardware design teams to work remotely during COVID. (That's why they shipped a "Pro" SKU first; the "Pro" SKU was what they needed.) Many of those same engineers were likely wearing prototypes of the Vision Pro to design later revisions of the Vision Pro.

My guess, though, is that early revisions didn't have all of visionOS (especially the computer-interaction parts) finished yet; and therefore, the Vision Pro was, at the time, really just serving as a peripheral for viewing of spatially-AR-embedded 3D objects (i.e. their hardware prototypes). The workflow likely looked like: edit and collaborate in a CAD program, with the headset off; save their changes; push the 3D model to the headset; pop the headset on; check out their changes ("do a walk around" of the object); take the headset back off; and go back to editing/collaborating on their computer.

Obviously, the original band would have worked just fine for that workflow!