Welcome to Apple’s new (mixed) reality.
The company on Monday made the highly-anticipated unveiling of its Vision Pro headset that can transport users into a movie theater or replay a fond, recorded memory of a child’s birthday party—all without having to leave their living rooms. The new headset catapults the tech giant into a new product line — its first addition in years — that it hopes will be a hit like the iPhone and Apple Watch.
But it’s also a huge gamble for Apple, which must overcome what is so far a lethargic market for virtual and augmented reality headsets. Other than video game enthusiasts, the market for bulky and, for some people, off-putting ski goggle-like devices has turned out to be relatively small despite billions of dollars spent by companies like Facebook to grab an early lead against rivals.
Apple hopes to shake up the market with its well-known design flair by making its headset sleek and adding high-end features, like the ability to navigate through virtual reality by using only hand movements and voice commands. Apple has used the playbook previously, to great success, with the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch: Enter a market relatively late with a product that is stylish and easier-to-use than established rivals, and charge a premium.
Indeed, Apple will have to overcome a starting price tag for the Vision Pro that far exceeds the competition, at $3,499. That’s seven times more than Meta’s Quest 3 headset, which is around $500, and 75% more than the high-end Varjo Aero, which costs $2,000.
According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), more than 8.5 million VR headsets were sold in 2022. Nearly 80% of those devices were Meta’s VR headsets. Meanwhile, only about 278,000 AR headsets were sold.
Analysts aren’t expecting a major blockbuster, at least to begin with.
“Vision Pro is something that investors will need to try before they believe. There are so many questions I have, that may take months to answer as content and applications build,” Gene Munster, a longtime Apple analyst at Deepwater Asset Management, wrote on Twitter.
Similarly, Daniel Ives, a managing director at Wedbush, predicted that Apple will only sell 150,000 headsets in the first year of their release and take in negligible revenue from the product. He blamed the low sales largely on the device’s high cost and added the first version is aimed mainly at outside developers, who the company hopes will create apps and other whiz-bang features for the device, rather than mainstream consumers.
Long term, however, Wedbush was optimistic about the headset, predicting Apple will sell roughly 1 million headsets after an expected price drop in the following year.
Not surprisingly, Apple CEO Tim Cook had nothing but good things to say about the Vision Pro. Playing the role of chief pitchman during Apple’s WWDC conference for developers on Monday, he called the headset “revolutionary” and crowed that it was “years in the making.”
“It’s the first Apple product you look through, not at,” Tim Cook told the audience, drawing a contrast with all the screen-focused products that Apple is known for.
Headsets from other manufacturers have required using handheld remotes to navigate and interact with the devices. In contrast, users of Vision Pro manipulate and maneuver what they see by exclusively using their eyes, hands, and voice.
Users can “swim” underneath the surface of the ocean and seemingly project a movie into any space. It can also project a user’s Mac computer into any space, allowing users to write an email or edit a video with what appears to be a much larger screen.
Vision Pro uses Apple technology and software to encode the user’s face into a digital persona and create a new experience in Facetime, putting users virtually face-to-face with people far away. Headsets before Vision Pro—described in Monday’s presentation as “just you and your content”—have sometimes been described as anti-social. Virtual reality devices remove the user from the real world with other people and vice versa. Apple’s solution to this is a feature called Eyesight that automatically detects when people are around. If so, it makes the eyes of the person wearing the headset visible to the others so it doesn’t seem like they’re in their own world.
While the headset functions independently, a battery pack dangles from the back of the headset.
During the presentation, Disney CEO Bob Iger came on stage to announce a partnership with Apple. The Disney + streaming service will be available on the device, while other tie-ins appeared to be under consideration, such as swimming alongside a sea turtle in a National Geographic documentary or interacting with characters and scenes from Disney and Marvel movies.
Apple didn’t give a specific date when Vision Pro will be available. It only said that it will be sometime early next year.
