Absolutely insane that in 2025, I cannot say “Siri, turn on the TV and resume Finding Nemo”, when it is playing in the TV app and is the first option listed there.
In the first couple months, about 250,000 sold and then another 150,000-200,000 sold over the rest of the Vision Pro's first year which just wrapped up, leaving about 50,000 to 100,000 units left for 2025, until the follow up spec bump arrives late in 2025 or early in 2026.
Demand must be pretty low if 50K-100K units are enough to cover 2025.
Now, if we look at Meta, they've sold a few tens of millions of Quests after 5 years in the market and likely has fewer than 10M active users (if they'd broken that ceiling they'd have said so, but growth has either slowed dramatically or stalled.) That suggests less than 50% usage compared to purchasers.
If we assume similar for Vision Pro, that suggests about 200,000 active users after 1 years in the market, and less than 300,000 users after 2 years in market.
Hard to say that's anything but a massive failure for Apple. A couple hundred thousand users with not much likelihood for growth in the next couple of years.
The only possible saving grace could be the "affordable" model, expected to come in around $2,000 and support the latest greatest VisionOS, but with lowered component costs which will hit displays and lenses the hardest, I suspect. The premium materials and second screen probably also have to go to keep Apple happy with their margins. AVP had a BOM of about $1,550 and sold for $3,500, a 2.25X markup. Even if they drop their markup down to 2.0X and go with a Quest like optical stack and plastic housing, that BOM probably cannot fall to less than $1,000 meaning a $2,000 price tag.
That Vision not-Pro is in development now and is likely to arrive about a year after the Pro spec bump (call it AVP 1.1 or 1.5) and at a price that's unlikely to spark a lot of new demand as it still comes in more costly than a family of iPhones, a couple of MacBook Airs or a solidly geared MacBook Pro, all infinitely more useful than the Vision Pro.
Finally, there's the question of whether the goggles form factor can ever achieve mainstream appeal. Even Quest, with 5 years in market, hasn't broken out of a niche, with less than 1/10th the users as the last place game console. My theory is that normal people care about their appearance, and particularly their faces, a lot. Few are going to want to turn that face into something dorky now matter how good the experience. Further, about half the population is women and women spend about $500,000,000,000 on hair and makeup products every single years, and about an hour a day in the mirror applying all of that, before ever stepping foot outside the house. How are they gonna deal with taking that thing on and off throughout the day, at work as Tim Cook would have us believe. Will they need to spend time in the bathroom every couple hours fixing their faces, and how about that light seal? Can you imagine that foam all caked with makeup, slimy and growing things getting repeatedly smashed into your face and held in place with straps around your head?
I had my first VR HMD experience at video game arcade in the mid-80s. I tried again in the '90s when a second, lighter generation built on PC components rather than bespoke stuff. The third generation never really left the labs but I played with them in the mid-2000s and they were seemingly built from laptop supply chains, with LCD screens and smaller form factors from the laptop shrinks. Finally, in about 2015, we got this 4th generation of HMDs, including stand-alone. Stand alone headsets I think did a lot for facial PCs but not enough.
These things are still ~500-650 grams, ~18-24 oz, ~1.2-1.5 lbs.and they're not getting lighter. The 3rd generation of Quest is only 10% lighter than the 1st and the Vision Pro is 1.3X that because of premium materials and a second display mostly. I don't know if you've seen actual users posting photos but all of the regular users have multi-directional, after-market head straps that look a hell of a lot dorkier than the "Solo Knit Band" that Apple ships with the Vision Pro, unfit for purpose give all the after market solutions and their usage. Even the Quest eschewed function for fashion somewhat here and those users also need extra support to stop these facial PCs from literally causing them pain, in the face, head and neck. It doesn't seem like these things are approaching a usable form factor, or that they can.
And though they would have you believe so, Meta and Apple are not evolving these HMDs into the spectacles form factor. AR spectacles will come, in about a decade they might even get some traction, but they are an entirely different tech stack and a mostly different user experience that's hardly "immersive" VR but rather more like your car's heads up display, in your glasses, perhaps with Apple Watch like capabilities for navigation, media, notifications, etc. and the hardware will offer narrow field of view (probably half that of VR goggles) and limited brightness and resolution making it ideal for simple overlays on the real world but hardly useful for rich experiences--again, think of how much you can do with your car's heads up display.
So, if AVP and Quest goggles are failing, and decent AR spectacles are a decade away, how do these companies justify the combined $1,000,000,000 spent achieving only millions or hundreds of thousands of users and bridge the gap to AR spectacles?
I think it'll be the OS. Facebook will have one, Google will have one, and Apple will have one. We may even see Microsoft or others come with their own but I suspect like mobile phones we'll settle on just a few operating systems. And I think these companies, which have each started with immersive VR goggles, because that's what current tech can do and because it makes for impressive demos, will start bending their operating systems more toward AR and less toward VR, eventually leaving immersive experiences behind in favor of less exciting but infinitely more practical AR spectacles which have an acceptable form factor for many and meaningful use cases for people outside of their homes. They will then claim that the goggles were always a transition technology and pretend that their massive investments weren't massive flops, but a necessary step on the path to spectacles. That of course will be complete horse shit, but what ever gets them to something actually usable for the masses is fine in my book. A shame that R&D spend was wasted on goggles instead of all going to spectacles. We might be 5 years away instead of 10+. Well, that's Silicon Valley for you, go big or go home, even if it's entirely the wrong play.
This is true, but also mostly irrelevant. People will cross that bridge if it's worth it, potentially in waves until general acceptance.
Headphones had to cross that barrier, and it's not uncommon now to have people walking around all day with an earplug in their ear. Watches back in the days, and smart watches now have gone the same path. Norms will change.
The real question is whether the VR headset provide something worth it, and the answer for now is mostly "nah", games and niche occupations being the only real beneficiaries.
We're still waiting for somethings that has the versatility and pragmatism of the Quest and a yet better harder specs than the AVP. Basically a retina MacBook moment. When we get there I think there will be a lot more potential, and we'll accept the VR goggles as workhorses where the bulk has a purpose, vs the "normal" glasses which can be lighter and do a lot less (what we already have with the Ray-Bans)
The OS won't probably also matter that much when we get cross platform apps as we've seen in the mobile and ganing world.
FWIW, when I was at Meta, and working on wearable devices, it was stated up front that all day wearable AR glasses was the final goal. Shipping other products was as well, but also as a means to explore how to build abd productionize the tech required for AR. That's why you have things like Oculus, Ray Bans, wrist wearables, huge investments in 3D world mapping, research in hands-free controls, off device-compute, etc.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/604378/apple-n107-ar-glasses-c...
Apple may charge a premium for their devices but they are not stupid otherwise the iPhone would cost far more than it does now. I can almost guarantee that they knew that this would not be a mainstream device and it was them getting their feet wet while the technology catches up to the software.
Maybe they even look at their success with the Apple Watch. When it first came out it was basically positioned as completely different device than it is now where most of the focus is on health with notifications being secondary. So get something out there and learn what people actually want.
Some of the work on the Vision Pro will have an impact on other devices and other way around.
Apple is clearly playing the long game here and maybe it will work, maybe it won't. But there is zero chance that they are abandoning it a year in. And unlike the original Apple Watch, the Vision Pro has a decent amount of compute in it to handle future updates even if a new version does come out.
Secondly, Apple support among the Apple developer community surveys is at lowest since the iPhone came to be, they won't get too much community support targeting Vision Pro as development platform, unless they change their hubris towards the development community.
They are where they are, and not yet another footnote in the company giants that went down burning, because the development community support in first place, when it was uncertainy how many pennies were left in Curpertino's account.
At the end of this year, or early next, Apple may produce and ship a spec bump for the Vision Pro, call it v1.1 or 1.5. Then, about a year later, if all goes well, Apple will ship a "not-Pro" version that is expected to cut premium materials, the external display, and drop the optical stack down to something more like Quest's. Combined with a cut in Apple's margin, they should be able to get the price down to about $2,000, $1,999 to conform with Apple's pricing style guide. Then, about a year after that, if Apple's still pushing forward, they will likely ship the follow-up Vision Pro, call it v2.
So, expect the Vision Pro 2 to arrive in late 2027 or early 2028. That's about a 4 year gap, closer to 5 years from the announcement.
You can call that nay-saying, I call it analysis.
I think it'll be more like Newton, they'll push hard for a couple of years to make it acceptable and when demand fails to materialize (at Apple scale) they will spike the project and say, like with Newton, as Jobs did, that "to realize their ambitious plans, they needed to concentrate all efforts in one direction"a probably AI or whatever the next big bubble happens to be about.
$3k is a ton of money in some cases, but over 3 years it's $20 a week. It doesn't have to be all that great to be worth $20 a week.
I suppose we'll have to wait and see.
So if your use case is cool 3D movies you might be out of luck, but desktop mirroring should work at least 3+ years.
(What I really want is MacOS windows surrounding me, taking up way more visual real estate than even a large monitor. I'm sure that's a lot harder but it seems maybe possible since the device can tell where I'm looking.)
I ultimately returned mine because, as cool as it was, the isolation and neck pain weren’t worth it. It’s an awesome way to watch a movie (alone) or use to extend your laptop but ultimately it’s just you in there. I’d never wear this around people and my son was creeped out by it and asked me to take it off. It’s difficult to use for more than an hour which would interrupt my workflow if I was wearing it while working on my laptop.
I hope they continue iterating because I’d love to try again if they can cut the bulk. The guest mode addition would’ve been nice to have even though I probably wouldn’t let my kids try it because it’s too expensive.
I can’t say less about apple intelligence…
Everyone expects iPhone or nothing though.
I do want Apple Intelligence, I use it daily on my Mac. Agree on the Vision Pro though; I liked mine when I had one, but it was way too expensive for something that I was actively searching to find a use case for.
I should clarify, that's exactly what I do want and pretty much what I use it for; I like it for its platform integrations. I like the automatic summarization¹ of my new emails, iMessages, various notifications, etc. I also like being able to highlight any text in my browser and have it summarize it or, if I've written it, proofread it.
I don't use the chatting features at all. I think I've tried that a total of three times, and the last two it explicitly asked me if I wanted to have it ask ChatGPT handle the request because it was complex or something like that.
¹ I'm aware of the issues surrounding AI summarization; I still read my emails and messages, but I like it for getting an idea of what's going on in my inboxes at a glance.
I gave apple intelligence one week before deciding to disable it everywhere.
Though, I am quite bearish on “AI” assistance. (i have AI in quotes because theres a lot of machine learning things, like machine vision, that smell and sound a lot like what we call AI today).
Basically I just like the native integrations you get by having it built in with the platform.
That's because these form factors cannot work. Even at half the weight, a feat that's probably a decade away, they're still a face-smashing PC held in place with straps that go around your head. There is no use cases outside of specialized industry where going into the office and donning even that light weight facial PC will be acceptable to normal people. It's a non-starter and always has been.
Despite having the patents on what became the Vision Pro, Steve would have smothered that baby in the crib the day his team couldn't answer how women, half of the population, were going to deal with the caked on makeup and nastiness of that light seal after a few uses. That the Apple of today either didn't consider that, didn't care, or has the hubris to think they can force that on us is irrelevant. What matters is that Apple failed here to consider the user and seems to only have considered the competition and the stock price.
Apple was never inherently good at coming up with new products, they brought in good talent and gave them a good environment to work in. Remove that and you remove the competency from the business.
There is no technology path between these goggles and a spectacles form factor. This tech, the "immersive" goggles, is a dead end and money spent on it would have been better spent on inventing the technologies we need for actually acceptable form factors, or pretty much anything else you can think of, actually.
Spatial Gallery is the more interesting part to me, in that it sounds like the AVP-exclusive 3D content feed that should have been available at launch.
Do you work in AR/VR regularly? I'd love for apple to release a toolkit for creating spacial environments ourselves.
I'm surprised this wasn't already a thing, coming from google's ecosystem I think of having this as table stakes.
In the context of using a headset for keyboard free entertainment (movies, maybe some games) it seems actually almost important as a feature, it means you can send simple replies without fighting with a virtual keyboard or switching devices.
I’m sure they considered this, would love a technical explanation. Maybe it wouldn’t be smaller?
The per eye resolution is smaller (2560x2560 vs 3660x3200) but not enough for the lens and screen to be significantly different IMHO.
Lack of eye tracking would be more impacting, but we could probably get away with only a slightly bigger bump somewhere ?
[0] https://store.bigscreenvr.com/en-jp/products/bigscreen-beyon...
I'm not sure if the compute part takes up all that much thickness? Just think of how thin your phone is, and much of it is battery.
It's definitely not for everyone though so I get it.
Instead it's just another Apple Device (TM) which is $3500 with an inferior set of features compared to other products. I can abide by inferior features with my Mac (vs Linux) since it does most of what I want, and my iPhone (vs. Android) since I prefer an OS that spies a bit less than Google's, but in a VR/AR headset I want to be able to play VR/AR games the way Gabe intended!
I don't hate Apple's products at all, I like most of them for what I need them for and some are better (their AppleTV boxes are great), but I don't know why they insist on sniffing their own farts sometimes.
This is a roundabout way to say that you were never going to be excited about the Apple Vision Pro.
> Instead it's just another Apple Device
Please list the Apple products that this doesn’t apply to.
> but in a VR/AR headset I want to be able to play VR/AR games the way Gabe intended
It’s extremely clear that the first Apple Vision Pro was never going to be prioritizing gaming.
GP says “I don’t like it because X, Y and Z” and you come to say “Well it is X, Y, and Z so of course you don’t like it”
That’s like me saying I would like the Sun if it rose in the west and was lime green. I’m never going to like the Sun! There is no chance of it.