Apple cuts Vision Pro shipments as demand falls 'sharply beyond expectations'
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
Tech companies keep pushing towards all-digital because they carry a lot more power in a world of their own making. They keep trying to get away from solving real-world pain points (e.g. being able to talked to loved ones) to solving for manufactured pain points (e.g. dopamine addiction to short-form content).
But you can only have a single display in VR. My single oldschool physical display works way better. So this limitation makes it an expensive curiosity than a useful tool.
That's not a hardware limitation.
In AVP I tend to run three displays equivalent to MacBook screen, but five is fine too in a kind of + shape.
They seem to have misestimated the number of folks deliberately purchasing to blog or YouTube about it then return it.
I remember the same comments when the iPad came out 14 years ago
Hint: never gonna happen
I think the Vision is too expensive and has too little software support.
Quest 3 Sold an Estimated 900K-1.5 Million Units in Q4 2023.
Vision Pro is nice and all, but it's such a high price to pay although you're essentially buying a macbook pro. Still, in terms of revenue is still $1.4B for the quarter
This means so they are likely in the red (unprofitable) on VisionPro.
This ignores the opportunity cost of the VisionPro team working on something else.
Apple could have made normal fashionable glasses with a screen aka The Apple Watch / Apple AirPods strategy - but for eyes.
But they went the heavy ski mask strategy with 2 hour battery life.
You mean ski goggles.
They were hoping for consumer (or industry) acceptance. They visibly did not get that.
It’s quite clearly not designed for mainstream use without enterprise features or a consumer price point.
Remember also that hardware pipelines are 2-3 years long. They almost certainly are well into the design of the consumer model that will come out in 18-24 months. By that time, there will be many apps available for them because of the AVP1 being in the hands of tens of thousands of developers for 12+ months.
Intel DTK - $999
Apple Silicon DTK - $500
iPhone - No DTK, just released without third party native apps at all.
That combined with how Apple regularly whiffs enterprise support and the fact that it sits right in the middle of their current display prices looks very much like they intended it to be a true consumer/industry release.
While Oculus didn't take off, the DK1 had a massive hype and a large community building stuff.
This isn’t Amazon. There is no 10 or 20 year vision. These Fortune 500 companies only have visions that last a couple of years, and in some cases a few quarters.
For productivity, I could see replacing my Apple watch with a pair of Apple Glasses. Useful for alerts and basic data such as exercise stats and GPS overlays, etc.
Add a few buttons to the side of the glasses for core functions.
Is there no market for such a product, or is the tech for this still to primitive?
Could you put them in smart glasses too? Sure, but the display tech just isn’t there yet to make it nonintrusive.
It is priced at about twice what people will expect, has very limited apps, and very limited "immersive media". Some of that will get better over the next year ... but a promise of "better next year" won't move units today.
It was always clear that the form factor was workable and the execution just needed to evolve a tiny bit. The AVP has an unworkable form factor: 2 pounds of headset and battery, and wearing it means mussing your hair and makeup and smashing a strap-on dorkbox to the front of your face.
That's entirely unworkable in ways that cannot be fixed with a software update or even next year's incremental hardware improvements. This form factor is a decade away from mainstream at best.
This is nothing like the Watch and only someone with a child's view of these products would make that claim.
The problem with AVP is that the people who DID buy it can't manufacture reasons to USE it. Apple needed to have a very strong push out of the gate with new content weekly.
I only use the watch when surfing or doing mountain biking. It's still not all that great of a device, and not much (in a practical sense) has changed since 2015. Limited functionality and what is there is frustrating to use, especially while in action.
However I can't think of any actual applications for it that would have a return on investment which means it's not worth spending that money. Literally everything it does can be done better elsewhere for less money.
I feel like this is a rephrasing of the same thing. If it delivers too little for the cost it costs too much.
I wonder what Apple's sales expectations were for AVP.
$1B in revenue for a brand new product that's only been out for 2.5 months seems a massive success to me [0].
But then again, at Apple's scale - $1B isn't much.
https://www.proactiveinvestors.com/companies/news/1045835/ap...
Market consensus went through the roof based on pace of initial sales then those numbers stuck, but some Apple numbers at the time seemed to suggest this same 400K range.
VR is cool but it's not "$3500 for a toy" cool, at least not for me and I think not for most people.
I mean, I got my comparatively-cheaper 2-year-old iPhone 12 Pro Max stolen from me about a year ago in a mugging, and that wasn't even nearly as flagrant. A person who wants to mug someone sees someone wearing an Apple Vision Pro, and they know that this person has a $3500 item glued to their face, as well probably an expensive iPhone in their pocket as well.
That is just a dumb mugger since those phones can only be sold for parts given the way Apple locks them down with your password/Pin/Face. The only place those phones can go is on a ship container to China to be recycled for spare parts, and even that's dubious.
Fun fact, when I got home, I of course locked it right away, but I got my wife to call it to see if we could get ahold of the mugger, and we did, and he said he would give it back to me for $300.
There was no chance in hell I was going to give him money and reward extortion, and I had no guarantees that even if I did give him the money that I'd get the phone back anyway [1], but I suppose that that's still a market right? I suspect at least some percentage of people do end up paying just to minimize the headaches of having to buy a new phone. I'll admit that while it was never really "on the table", for just an instant I did consider just paying the guy instead of having to buy another expensive phone while unemployed.
[1] In this case I am principled to a fault. I have a very strong "I will not be extorted, I will not reward extortion, and I do not negotiate with terrorists" policy in my life. It's one of the very few hills I will actually die on, and it's bitten me a few times.
I feel like that's been the discourse around it though, that this is something you're supposed to wear all the time and it gives you a proper augmented reality experience. Maybe that'll be the case eventually but I do not think we're there yet.
Who could have predicted this?!
It’s a good looking piece of tech, but unfortunately like the rest of the Apple ecosystem. It’s locked down. It’s out of reach (price wise) for most people. The mandatory App Store from a user perspective is dead to me.
Repair process looks painful.
Facebook and Apple need to change their shit up. Open up the ecosystem. Let users load up their own OS/Apps. Stop tying it down to your locked down ecosystems and warranty programs. Give us root, build schematics, and let us build.
Stop abusing your users and developers.
Kids care what their friends think. A lot. Green bubbles are the same thing and so parents get their kids iPhones instead of Galaxies and the lock continues.
A more accurate comparison, IMO, would be the iPad’s performance in the overall laptop market.
Personally, I've moved off of Android to Apple in 2019 because I was done with tinkering and just wanted a device that worked well (even if locked down in an ecosystem).
North Korea 99.49% Tokelau 94.44% Bermuda 92.32% Faroe Islands 92.23% American Samoa 85.85% Niue 79.86% Saint Pierre and Miquelon 70.6% Monaco 69.42% Jersey 67.65% Guernsey 67.51%
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/iphone-ma...
Microsoft does this sort-of with language development (C#) and VS code on the software side. Now imagine a Microsoft "VSCode Box" or "VSCode portable", i.e. a hardware device they could sell that builds upon the OS work.
In my example, Microsoft has the software side but not the hardware. Currently Apple has the hardware side but not the software.
As for productivity, typing would have to... work...? For this product to be useful.
Otherwise, VR remains a gaming product.
Yeah for the worse.
Given how badly the PSVR 2 flopped, it may be too risky for game devs currently.
Their best bet to bootstrap the platform is to make it computing-first around the iPad platform, and that means leading with multitasking, AR/MR, and with computing-oriented inputs.
From there they could’ve expanded the spatial capabilities over time and eventually create a consumer version. The Vision Pro is the Newton of mixed reality.
Seems like they haven’t really pinned that crowd down though and not being able to have multiple virtual monitors is a sales killer imo.
For instance, can a small group of people play a table top game together where half are in the room, half are remote, and the experience feels quite fluid.
https://defensescoop.com/2023/09/21/army-awards-microsoft-95...
But, not at that price.
Might be tempted by this one… at like $1,500. Maybe.
At $800 (I know, no way given the BOM cost alone) I’d probably already have one.
But whether today's technology can actually deliver that (at any price point) is what everyone is arguing about.