Apple Intelligence comes to Apple Vision Pro in April

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.

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.

(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.)

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.

Do you work in AR/VR regularly? I'd love for apple to release a toolkit for creating spacial environments ourselves.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.