Younger Apple customers may be the key to Apple Vision Pro's success
Apple has established a reputation for introducing innovative products, albeit at a premium price point, and the potentially higher cost of the Apple Vision Pro may not necessarily impede its success.

Apple Vision Pro
On Monday, the company finally unveiled the highly anticipated mixed-reality headset. Due to its initial price of $3,499, the launch trajectory of this product may deviate from Apple's typically more affordable offerings.
But the latest report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) points out that Apple products consistently maintain a premium price point and still manage to be highly desirable and widely adopted. At this stage, it's impossible to predict if the Vision Pro will become the next essential device, but Apple isn't at its peak yet.
The seamless integration of software, services, and hardware within the Apple ecosystem contributes to the company's competitive edge. The report examines the iPhone, iPad, and Mac and the statistics of their ownership.
For instance, over 40% of Apple device users who are under 45 years old possess all three products, indicating their strong commitment to the Apple ecosystem. Conversely, among users aged 55 years or older, slightly less than one-quarter own all three products, suggesting a comparatively lower level of adoption within this age group.
It might be expected that older, potentially more affluent customers would have a higher prevalence of complete ecosystem ownership due to the premium prices of Apple products. However, this assumption does not hold.

Number of Apple products owned by age of owner as of March 2023
Older groups, typically less familiar with technology, are less inclined to own multiple Apple devices. On the other hand, younger people who own Apple products tend to own multiple devices and actively engage with the Apple ecosystem.
These younger customers have many years of technology purchases ahead of them. Like their parents, they will continue to acquire and use machines that weren't yet in existence during their youth, but they will already be established as Apple customers when those devices are introduced.
As Apple continues to enhance and refine the Vision Pro, the headset's price will likely decrease over time. This price reduction may make the product more appealing to younger users who may not possess the same financial resources as their older counterparts.
Consequently, they may be more inclined to purchase the headset and drive its adoption. Even if the Vision Pro doesn't supplant the iPhone as a primary computing device, it probably won't fail as a product.
Read on AppleInsider

Apple Vision Pro
On Monday, the company finally unveiled the highly anticipated mixed-reality headset. Due to its initial price of $3,499, the launch trajectory of this product may deviate from Apple's typically more affordable offerings.
But the latest report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) points out that Apple products consistently maintain a premium price point and still manage to be highly desirable and widely adopted. At this stage, it's impossible to predict if the Vision Pro will become the next essential device, but Apple isn't at its peak yet.
The seamless integration of software, services, and hardware within the Apple ecosystem contributes to the company's competitive edge. The report examines the iPhone, iPad, and Mac and the statistics of their ownership.
For instance, over 40% of Apple device users who are under 45 years old possess all three products, indicating their strong commitment to the Apple ecosystem. Conversely, among users aged 55 years or older, slightly less than one-quarter own all three products, suggesting a comparatively lower level of adoption within this age group.
It might be expected that older, potentially more affluent customers would have a higher prevalence of complete ecosystem ownership due to the premium prices of Apple products. However, this assumption does not hold.

Number of Apple products owned by age of owner as of March 2023
Older groups, typically less familiar with technology, are less inclined to own multiple Apple devices. On the other hand, younger people who own Apple products tend to own multiple devices and actively engage with the Apple ecosystem.
These younger customers have many years of technology purchases ahead of them. Like their parents, they will continue to acquire and use machines that weren't yet in existence during their youth, but they will already be established as Apple customers when those devices are introduced.
As Apple continues to enhance and refine the Vision Pro, the headset's price will likely decrease over time. This price reduction may make the product more appealing to younger users who may not possess the same financial resources as their older counterparts.
Consequently, they may be more inclined to purchase the headset and drive its adoption. Even if the Vision Pro doesn't supplant the iPhone as a primary computing device, it probably won't fail as a product.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
but there are headsets that are being made, and sold to business. Many of those exceed $3,000 and even $4,000. They still don’t equal this. Microsoft has a contract with the military here for $1.5 billion, for a militarized HoloLens, but that hasn’t been successful yet, after several years. Still not as good.
Apple doesn’t expect to sell millions of this first gen. device. I’ve heard numbers bandied about from 100,000 to almost a million, in the first year. No doubt a second gen. will be less expensive.
“For the rest of us.”, which means a price that can be swallowed during this era of financial insecurity. If not, this thing is another cube.
I'm not in line to buy. I'm in one of the "older" groups and I've got plenty of Apple stuff - MacBook Air S1, HomePods, apple tv, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, probably more. $3,500 is just too steep. Maybe I'll change my mind.
There will be plenty of killer applications for this device and the price will come down. Can't you imagine how the online dating apps are going to use this tech?
The easy answer to your question is: they will put it on a credit card. Hey, Apple/GS will provide that too.
Conversely, the open-ended "starting at" is concerning...
if these optical elements from Zeiss are another 300-600 bucks, even fewer will adopt version 1. Would be fascinating to know their sales estimate for Year One...
Nonetheless, they needed to do this to get the developer community interested in the platform, as well business and consumers to begin to see the possibilities....
*apologies to Neil Stephenson.
There is so much more to this story. Apple is onto a winner with VisionPro.
I do own a recent VR headset right now, that's connected to a bog standard PC with high end graphics and did my math ... that rig cost me way more than $4000 and is far worse than the Apple Vision Pro, it also includes a cable that grounds me to a huge PC box sitting on the ground (no moving around any time soon) I have to deal with Windows OS, it's extremely fiddely to set up and drives me nuts to set up bc the Augmented reality requires me to clean out the living room or suffer the consequences.
Yes there are things from Meta that are similar in functionality (as in you can run programs on device etc), but in my view that does not compare kindly when you are looking at the things you could do with my setup mentioned above or the Apple Vision Pro and you don't have to gift your personal data to Meta and/or suffer the consequences of Microsoft Windows as an additional bones.
Look what it really can to and look how easy it is to use and you are with me. $3500 is a low low price for what it offers. You can enjoy paying a lower price for competing (not competitive) offerings for a short time and will end up suffering for the long time on what that cheap setup brings. (As in my case I seldom use that expensive rig, because of all the hassle it requires to start with).
Some competition at our age has us starting with the women. I'm not complaining though
Keep safe.
And once they've started using it there....
but if Apple came out with a more limited headset, more like the Quest Pro, at about the same price, the criticisms would be dramatic. Apple has been expected to come out with something category leading, and that’s exactly what they’ve done. So it’s expensive. Fine. It doesn’t natter. We see here what Apple can do owning the entire stack, which is far more than anyone else can do.
no Apple is going to drop the price in another model at some point. Will it have all of the features of this one? Well, likely pretty close, but more affordable to the average person. Apple as we see with their other products sets a minimum performance/feature floor, and every product has to sit on, or above it, until they set it higher some years later. It’s why we don’t see a $300 iPhone, for example.
so everything for Apple’s AR/VR future has to meet a minimum standard, and this headset is making that minimum clear to everyone. In the long run, where consumers, business and likely the government will all be customers, that makes sense. And many of their customers aren’t price sensitive. There are far more expensive headset solutions for the latter two customer categories than this one, available now.
I just hope it has some kind of killer app that isn’t porn, but imagine some bizarre 3d-ish porn is coming requiring this thing.