I'm not sure what Apple's sales expectations were but if the Apple Vision Pro is not meeting them, they built the wrong product.
Apple already knows and has publicly stated that their high $3500 price limits adoption to a smaller market of enthusiastic (and wealthy) early adopters. Even though this particular 2024 iteration of the product is too expensive to be a mass consumer hit like the 1980s Sony Walkman, the more interesting question is if it can be the start of a new paradigm that will be later filled by cheaper iterations.
Past examples of 1st iteration of products being very expensive but triggers a massive new market:
- 1981 IBM PC costs $5240 in inflation-adjusted 2023 dollars ($1565 in 1981 dollars)
- 1983 Motorola DynaTAC (the "brick phone" ) is $11716 in 2023 dollars ($3995 in 1984)
(And the first flat screen tv I bought in 2003 was $4100 for a 32-inch which is $7000 in today's dollars.)
IBM PCs had the "killer app" with Lotus 123 spreadsheet software as a compelling reason to buy it. Indeed, one of the questions when evaluating cheaper clone computers was "does it run Lotus 123?".
The issue is Apple Vision Pro doesn't have an analogous "killer app". The various demos in the Apple Store and Youtube videos of floating windows in your living room and immersive music videos are "interesting" ... but not indispensable tool for work and life.
It's too early to tell if future cheaper iterations of Apple Vision Pro will eventually take off like other previous expensive products like the IBM PC -- or be relegated to niche status like the over-hyped $5000 Segway.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
I bought a clone in '83 for $350. I think it was overclocked to a blazing 8 Mhz. Here's hoping VR follows that slope.
The old joke was that the Lotus 123 predecessor Visicalc sold more Apples than Apple sold Visicalc. Now that was a killer app. IMHO there's no analogous reason or app to buy VR headsets in general much less the Vision Pro in specific.
And until Visicalc there was no reason for most people to buy a (micro)computer. The only folks that bought them were (homebrew) tinkerers that couldn't afford minicomputers (PDPs) or mainframes, where there were "real" applications.
But things eventually trickled down to micros and people found uses for them.
The Vision Pro may simply be in the minicomputer stage of development.
I'm super curious, because in 1990 clones of IBM PC in my country still sells for 500-700 USD.
And yet, it completely changed how the world computed.
I do not see why the Vision Pro will not follow a similar trajectory, not least simply because it's an Apple product. Even if you sniffed at the first model, subsequent models will sport more powerful CPUs, more memory, better displays, and they will get the APIs and development model right to enable more kinds of applications. Apple is just dipping their toes into the water with this initial product much like they did with the Mac. Once they roll out more refined products, the difference with the Quest will be as night and day and it will be obvious that once again, Apple has changed how we compute.
Because there wasn't a $350 competitor that had been around for years that did much the same and excelled in some areas.
It's an incremental product charging revolutionary prices: sub-orbital trajectory.
This is really debatable. There have been computers before and after the Mac that were just as influential but much cheaper. Anecdotal of course, but back in the 80s and early 90s a Mac wasn't on my "must have list" at all. Macs were always overpriced and underpowered, and back then only useful for one thing: "desktop publishing".
Amigas provided much more bang-for-the-buck, and technology-wise Silicon Graphics workstations were far ahead (at 10x the price of course).
The Mac's real influence on mainstream computing might have been that it was an intermediate step to transfer the graphical UI research done at Xerox PARC into MS Windows ;)