This won't be successful, the $3500 price tag alone assures it. It will hopefully lead to something that's actually meant for end users, though.
How can you be so sure about a company that makes a monitor stand that sells for $1000?
Don’t forget Steve Ballmer famously mocked Apple because he thought iPhones were too expensive at $500 a pop.
Today, Apple sells $1000+ iPhones.
Apple already knows how to sell “overpriced” consumer hardware since they have a $5,000 Pro XDR monitor and $1,000 stand to go with that “overpriced” monitor in their line up.
The monitor is not a hit so there’s no reason to assume that $3,500 Vision Pro will be an (instant) hit, since it was intentionally priced to be out of reach of many people.
I guess people assume because it’s Apple, or perhaps because of the amount of buzz they generated with the reveal for the Vision Pro, every product they make has to be a hit
It's already established that smartphones are a huge market, and people are willing to pay a lot for what for most people is their main computer. Android manufacturers like Samsung are also selling $1,000 flagship smartphones.
No one's claimed that no one is going to buy the vision-pro. But there's no demonstrated huge existing demand for an extremely high-end VR headset. It's unlikely that a product nobody asked for costing $3,500 is going to give the technology mass market appeal or kick off widespread adoption.
Your reply doesn’t disagree with what I wrote. At all.
At the end of the day, the $3,500 price tag is also a signal as to Apple’s thesis about how well the product might do on the marketplace. Their thesis can mean a bunch of things:
1. they think the device will appeal to a niche set of professional customers that have bought or have the ability to buy products in this price range e.g. customers of the high-priced $5,000 Pro XDR Display I mentioned. Their plan might be to grow the applications that Vision Pros can be used for, which will lead to increased demand among pro users which will in turn grow the revenue from this niche segment.
2. they don’t think there’s mass market appeal to justify selling Vision Pro units at a lower price (or at a loss like other companies have done by deploying penetration pricing e.g. Meta) as you observed. Again, their plan might be to grow the applications that Vision Pro can be used for leading to increased demand. The shiny new spatial computing tech that makes the Vision Pro exciting could slowly make it’s way into other products in their line up (or they could introduce a less capable edition at a lower price tag).
E.g. Spatial computing could eventually make it’s way into the next-generation Pro XDR Display monitors used in the office. Apple could also expand their presence in the home with a fresh take on home projectors in-fused with spatial computing, to complement their Apple TV product.
I'd define success as paving the way for broader investment in the ecosystem. If third-party devs start building useful workflow tools and other experiences, it can become a cult favorite. From there, re-investment in further R&D can keep this improving.
Apple will very likely have a "Vision" (non-pro) product after the technology test bed is proven, etc.
It will be successful in the price range where it is located. My guess is that it will even beat the sales quantities of the quest pro, a headset which is about a third of the price.
It’s not fair to compare to an iPhone.