Is that a lot or a little?
180k consumers is barely a market.
I think it's mostly developers, though. I ordered one, to try some immersive data visualization stuff.
Considering what Dall-E and the like are capable of, I suspect that AI will be able to lay out data for us. This includes tasks where multiple web and smartphone apps are opened and data is entered. These could be opened grouped in framed windows, with process lines drawn between them.
"Developers! stomp Developers! stomp Developers!" is actually great wisdom.
I mention that because I have a feeling a venn diagram of the purchasers of both the Vision Pro and Index have a lot of overlap. I don't have data for that beyond the numbers being kind of similar, but:
- VR is a niche technology
- Index and Vision Pro are both quite pricey and unlikely to be someone's first go into the tech, so you're talking true VR enthusiasts. Casual wanna-tryers are going to go for a used Vive or a Meta Quest
That being said I wouldn't die on the hill of this analysis, because while the Index is expensive (full kit is about $1k) there's still a steep increase for Vision Pro, which runs $3,600 if memory serves.
[0: https://skarredghost.com/2023/03/03/quest-20-million-mainstr...]
This is a pretty big oversimplification. Anyone familiar with VR tech and VR gaming knows that experiences that aren't made and instead are modified after the fact to be VR compatible =/= VR experiences. In that sense, I would say the only truly AAA VR game I know of is Half Life Alyx. And it is incredible mind you, but this is a very, very, very exclusive club for games to be in. MAYBE you could count Skyrim VR as it's by far the most polished VR port I've played, with only some jank here and there. But then you have stuff like Fallout 4 VR which, and I say this as someone who put an unethical amount of time into Fallout 4, Fallout 4 VR is just... trash. Just pure garbage. Utterly unplayable. And then there's Doom 2016 VR, which like... you took a run and gun and had to remove the run part to make it so people wouldn't vomit violently after 5 minutes. Is it even the same game?
Don't get me wrong, I love that laptop, but a gaming PC it is not. Apple Silicon has the efficiency but not the raw horsepower, even if you get something like the Ultra. That doesn't even include things like DLSS and Reflex. I do my gaming on GeForce Now because it's a dramatically better experience.
That said, it should still be oodles more powerful than the Quest, at least. I wonder if Apple will actually try to push gaming on it.
It's the same silicon on laptop and desktop with apple gear though, and that isn't true with x86. The desktop chips with an edgy heat profile are nearly twice as fast as the laptops if not more. But compared to xbox or PS the apple machines still win. So it's really specialized gaming desktops that win, even though it is by a solid margin.
But in any case, I'd still consider gaming laptops specialized gaming hardware. It takes a 40-core M3 Max to approach ~4080 levels, and the Vision only has 10 GPU cores for a roughly 6k display at 90 Hz. That's not going to be a great AAA experience...
Personally I wish they went the opposite way, just a dumb display-only headset without the compute, and streamed everything from a Mac/desktop PC/the cloud.
But, still, it's pretty exciting to see this come out. I won't be able to afford something like this for a few years, but I'm still hoping Apple really makes a dent in this space.
The bigger question, also mentioned in the article, is how many of those preorders are scalpers.
More seriously I found 150 million active iPhones in the USA, which would make it roughly 0.12%, or we can use 40% of revenue to scale our original guess (since presumably the US contains a large proportion of those 1.2 billion who would purchase a $3500 device) and get to 0.035%.
So, yeah, $630m for one weekend is a lot.
Though, if you look at iPhone sales - Apple sold 13M iPhone 6s in the first week - and in 2 years sold about 200M - meaning about ~6.5% of sales over 2 years.
This would mean the Vision Pro might be on pace to sell about ~$6B per year - which is about ~1.5% of Apple revenue.
This is less than 1/3rd of AirPods - so, for a company the size of Apple - this doesn't really seem that significant right now.
It's obviously hard to predict the future, though...
This is a brand new product line. Nobody knows if they want one yet. Mass-market normies have barely heard of it. Now, if you'd compared it to the OG iPhone...
Similar to AirPods - the headset market has been around for a while now.
There's ~12M VR headsets being sold per year already. As far back as 2019 - there were ~5M VR headsets being sold per year.
I’m having flashbacks to iPhone and BlackBerry comparisons. Sure, they were both “smartphones” but once the App Store came out the iPhone was clearly in a different category of device. The form factor isn’t nearly as important to defining what the product category is as what the device is used for and what problems it solves IMO. App Store policies and shenanigans will probably prevent the Vision Pro from overlapping too much with existing VR headsets use cases.
Right now it isn’t clear that many people that like the Quest would buy a Vision Pro even if money wasn’t an issue. The use cases are that different. I think the reverse is true as well, there will be plenty of people that will be interested in the VP and not in VR headsets. If nothing else that points to market segmentation.
And in those 20 million Mac a year probably bulks of sales are cheaper Macbook air and Mac mini
It's unlikely to gonna be a big source of apple revenue until they can reduce price to sub $2000 and/or provider bigger value. Would like if they provided usb/Hdmi out so that it could also act as Mac and apple Tv replacement when connected to TV or monitor + MacOS support.
Not much for Apple, Meta reports 20 million Quest sales (18M of that Quest 2 sales so you can take an educated guess how much the 1 and Pro made up of the remaining 2M).
From what's going in the device the margins are probably not great on the main unit, especially when you compare it to the plastic Quest 2.
How big that is also depends on their production run, and I don’t think we’ll have any accurate figure for that for quite some time, if ever.