Apple Vision Pro is not the iPhone, and faces an incredibly steep uphill climb
Apple certainly isn't doomed if the Apple Vision Pro isn't a blockbuster out of the gate, which is good because it is launching into a product category that is so small and poorly defined that it doesn't even qualify as nascent yet.
Apple Vision Pro exploded view
It's been a long time since Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man's film adaptation and similar titles with virtual reality at its center "graced" our screens. It's been even longer since corporations like Disney started tech demonstrations for the public at its EPCOT park of very early virtual reality headsets.
It's now 2024, a little more than 15 years after commercial market tiptoes by companies. It's been a bit longer than a decade since Palmer Luckey fired up the Kickstarter that ultimately generated $2.5 million for the Oculus headset and ended up in a buy by then-Facebook for $2 billion two years later.
Augmented reality and virtual reality are still brand-new technologies, relatively speaking. It's going to take a lot of work to show users what it can do and how it will improve life because this isn't your music library in your pocket like an iPod was, or a three-in-one like Apple called the iPhone.
Apple Vision Pro just doesn't have the ubiquity and universality of the iPhone's uses, nor the utility of an iPad or Mac.
Apple does what it will do, with little concern surrounding competitors
I own Valve's Index, and the HTC Vive Pro. I've also spent a lot of time behind Microsoft's HoloLens. The Index and Vive Pro are in one family, and the HoloLens is another.
Valve's Index. Apple Vision Pro doesn't need the controllers, nor the lighthouses
The Apple Vision Pro is a hybrid of them all. Whether or not it is a hybrid of the best or worst features of the above three remains to be seen.
The Index and Vive perform well, when tethered to a computer. The HoloLens was a decent product that ended up mostly in enterprise, hampered by a very narrow vertical field of vision.
I used the Apple Vision Pro over the summer without Apple's explicit blessing. Even then, with embryonic software, it was clear that the Apple Vision Pro is Apple's typical no-compromises in hardware, with significant technology packed and integrated well into a single product.
It's also very expensive compared to the $1000 Index and the $1400 Vive Pro 2 without the attached computer. It's roughly in the same price class as the HoloLens, which isn't intended for consumers anymore.
The cost for Apple's offering to consumers is steep, there's no question. It's not steep so much because Apple wills it to be so, but because the bill of materials for what's inside it and the research that led to it are pricey.
This distinction is likely lost on the consumer, though. Despite the headset being necessarily expensive at $3500, regardless of technological prowess or advancements, it's a tough sell today to that consumer base that it needs to attract.
Apple isn't the only vendor struggling with this, though. It's also a tough sell for Meta at far less per headset and a lower total cost of ownership in an attached computer and headset versus just the Apple Vision Pro.
Apple wants you to believe that the Apple Vision Pro is a standalone computing device, but it's not a good one without the rest of Apple's ecosystem. It depends on iPad apps, for instance, although you don't need to also own an iPad. At launch, its major work benefit is virtual Mac screens -- but you definitely need a Mac for that.
Apple Vision Pro is an ancillary device to other Apple gear in the ecosystem. That works for the Apple Watch, but the Apple Vision Pro is nothing like the Apple Watch other than it goes around a part of your body that sticks out from your torso.
The Apple Vision Pro platform goes beyond hardware control, too. Apple also wants to shape the language around augmented and virtual reality.
Apple demands that developers not call software for it augmented reality or virtual reality. It's trying to command that "spatial computing" moniker for itself in the most Apple way possible.
Apple vs Meta for the eyeballs of the consumer
VR and AR are already a very hard sell to a disinterested public. Meta is burning cash on its Oculus ecosystem and is making headsets that cost less than one-quarter the price of the Apple Vision Pro.
By every account, they aren't selling very many, even at the $500-ish price point.
Internally, Meta seems to think that 20 million sales of Oculus in a half-decade is a failure. A presentation in 2023 laid this point bare and clearly spelled out that purchasers don't stay engaged with the software on the headset.
It's not from a lack of trying, iteration to the hardware, or marketing. Meta has a full marketing campaign behind its efforts and has for years. Mark Zuckerberg is doing his best to launch "metaverse" as a term.
Apple will not touch the Metaverse term, of course.
Apple knew what it had with the iPhone, but maybe not with Apple Vision Pro
Apple's iPhone launched into a hungry market, and wasn't an instant market-definer. Steve Jobs' iPhone demo was mostly smoke and mirrors, which fortunately wasn't seen through at the time.
But it was still clear that they knew what they had. The marketing push, even only on AT&T, was intense.
The Apple Watch had a definition of fashion and design. It seeded millions of dollars to stars, and Apple packed the launch auditorium with celebrities.
That wasn't a winning solution. While the Apple Watch had fitness-adjacent features, they really leaned into it later.
Apple Vision Pro at launch isn't a fully mature product, which is probably why there hasn't been a multimedia extravaganza beyond a single ad so far, promoting it after a debut at WWDC in June 2023.
Apple will define what is a success and a failure, and it will do so on its own terms
If Ming-Chi Kuo's after-launch guesses of 180,000 units sold at launch is correct, this makes Apple Vision Pro on its own a $750 million dollar business, overnight. Most stock analysts will trumpet victory or defeat based on their own metrics that mean nothing to non-investors, and probably not that much to investors either.
Apple will celebrate externally, regardless of how it feels about it internally. We expect a press release the week after shipments start, talking about the sell-out like it has done with iPad, Apple Watch, and HomePod.
In doing so, it fires up the reality distortion field that it uses on occasion. It wants that reality distortion field to work now, so it has less of a job to do later.
No matter how many units are available, sold, or coming in early 2024, no matter how loud Apple yells that the Apple Vision Pro is a success now, no matter if the stock analysts predict doom or triumph now, the whole-year 2024 is only the start of the saga and climb. I agree with the sentiment that Apple Vision Pro is right now in essence a paid developer kit unleashed on the world.
Apple Vision Pro in use (Source: Apple)
From the start, developers are the crank or starter motor that starts the big engine, and users are the fuel that makes the product run. Apple hopes the killer app will pop out, as it has before, but nothing is guaranteed.
This is a story told in the fullness of time. This is a story told in the non-Pro Apple Vision, and whatever the "Apple Glass" ultimately turns out to be.
This is also a story about how the rest of the world reacts to the hardware, and what competing vendors do in response to the gear. Meta's, HTC's, and others' responses and timelines will perhaps be the most telling on how afraid the rest of the market is.
As far as the absolute measure of success goes, Apple can wait effectively forever. It doesn't need to be profitable out of the gate, as the company has a stack of money that would make the most covetous dragon jealous to weather the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with little or no impact to the company as a whole.
Apple Vision Pro has use cases, but not universal ones
So here we are, a few days after preorders started and a bit more than a week before units ship to consumers. There are already hands-on accounts from time in a lab, and YouTube videos will pop out soon enough with that face that YouTubers make, filtered through EyeSight.
There have already been discussions about Apple Vision Pro in enterprise, for medical applications, and in manufacturing. But, none of them will demonstrate a universal appeal.
There just isn't a case for that right now. Apple Vision Pro is a niche in a niche that isn't defined well for the consumer market, and has no clear and wide use case.
Apple built it, regardless, knowing all this going into it. This isn't a shrine to baseball carved out of a cornfield in Iowa, though.
Shipping it doesn't mean that users will come. Apple will have to earn that, and break the "try it for a minute and put it back in the box forever" curse that virtual reality has so far.
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Comments
Another fun fact—Sony currently has capacity to make between 100,000-200,000 screens a month. Let’s assume 200K. That’s production of 100K units a month. Apple would never launch a product with those capacity constraints if expectations/aspirations were for big unit sales.
Gotta think longer term imo.
Apple can’t get developers to build apps and uses cases without its own contribution and commitment to making an incredible devices long term. This was just the second move after spending the better part of a decade building out ARkit. Gotta address Siri though. We can all now have voice conversations with ChatGPT and then trying to use Siri is like talking to a robotic golden retriever.
Vision Pro is purely and mainly for developers. After 2 or 3 successors, we will see clearly what this type of the product would impact us.
People have blamed about lack of innovations at Apple. Now, Apple brings it out and tries to prove that our skeptical view on Vision Pro is wrong.
Give some time to Apple.
You cannot have an innovation and an immediate success at the same time.
And I think you're being generous calling Siri a "robotic golden retriever." We'll see what pops out in iOS 18.
Think of how much more powerful the current iPhone is compared to the iPhone 5 or the trash can Mac Pro. The next decade will bring huge reductions in component size and power efficiency. But we can't get there in one step. I'm sure in 10 or 15 years' we'll all laugh at how limited the Vision Pro is in the same way we all look at that first iPhone with its tiny screen and lack of just about everything. But you have to start somewhere, and this looks like a fairly impressive and potentially useful beginning to me.
The ultimate determinant of success will be that visionOS products will have enough revenue to fund the next iteration of the hardware and software. How much money that is uncertain right now. If the sales are like the Macbook Pro lineup, about 7m to 10m units per year, that's going to be enough imo. This is in 2027 of 2028, not 2024. That's will be >10b per year in 2028! If the sales are like the Mac Studio, which are likely less than 1m units per year, probably not.
On the plus side, visionOS hardware shares a lot with all of Apple's other hardware. Same SoCs, same cameras, same sensors, and this talks a big cost line out of the Vision business. They can concentrate on decreasing the cost of the microOLEDs, lens, fabrics and assembly; and, revving the software which is running way behind.
I have to believe Apple created an extremely accurate finger and hand tracking system for this device. To build a huge library of gestures to enable a wide variety of inputs and controls.
So, yes!
They had a bearded guy do it in their promo video, and everyone was screaming in horror because he was recording with a VP instead of a camera or a phone.
And a third party company like BlackMagic will have a trick or two.
People buying the first iPhone had at least an intrinsic bullet list of features that the iPhone had to support out of the gate before they would even consider buying it. Few if any buyers at the time were banking on the possibility that the iPhone would turn into the amazing device that it is today. Enough of them thought that the iPhone was a big improvement over the other choices they had in front of them. And there were a lot of choices. If the iPhone wasn't great out of the gate it would have withered and died.
People buying the first Vision Pro only have a vague idea about everything that they expect it to do out of the gate. Sure, gaming, immersive experiences, entertainment, and eye popping visuals are on their bullet list. But what else is on the list? Those who have purchased other VR/AR products probably have a longer bullet list but there aren't nearly the number and variety of products on the market to compare the Vision Pro to compared to what the iPhone was going up against. Being able to run iPad apps right out of the gate is a benefit for sure, but a lot of people use their iPads and iPhones while doing other passive activities.
The Vision Pro is a much more intense pioneering effort by Apple than was the iPhone or iPad. The iPhone and iPad had a real market to go after. The Vision Pro is trying to build the market on the fly. The few competing products on the market only provide vague hints about what is possible in this market space. The number of current users of VR/AR products is probably a fraction of the number of people who were already using cellphones, semi-smart phones, BlackBerrys, and PDAs when the iPhone was released to the world.
Apple can spin up whatever terminology it wants to use around its products but the products themselves must be great in the eyes of users. We're living in a world driven by immediate gratification and short term thinking - at all levels. Nobody is going to wait for a product they buy today to achieve greatness later. They want it now. Fortunately, Apple does have a massive amount of credibility when it comes to bringing its uncharacteristically loyal customers (for the discretionary spending consumer market) along for the ride on new platforms and products. They are going to need enough of us satisfied with what's there already and also willing to buy into the future possibilities and promises of this new market and new type of product. As long as they keep everything pointed in the upward direction and show continuous improvement in the number and variety of useful apps on the Vision Pro I think they have a good chance of being successful. A lot of us are banking on this being a real deal, despite our current hesitancy.
We have multiple staffers with different opinions on the product, and we haven't been short on Apple Vision Pro news. The news has outnumbered the opinion pieces significantly.