Vision Pro Future Uncertain as All Headset Development Is Seemingly Paused

[Shirasaki]

Just before the arrival of the usual uninformed flock of comments about how "nobody wants a VR headset", remember that Meta sold more Quest 3 headsets last year at Christmas than Xbox's AND Playstations combined.

While VR headsets sales will never get to iPhone-like levels of popularity for now , who wouldn't want to achieve Xbox/Playstation level of sales ? The only thing that is killing the Vision is the insanely crazy price , and the weight.

I have a Quest 3, vastly inferior tech, but almost 8 times cheaper, and quite a bit lighter than the VP.

It's also made by MetaFacebook, one of the most horrible companies on the planet, and the Quest basically exists to harvest even more intimate and private personal data to sell it to the highest bidder. Just this fact makes me want Apple to persist in releasing the Vision Air faster so that I can get rid of the Quest.

The VR market shouldn't be a monopoly left to a surveillance company.

It just gets to show how little most folks care about their data being sold to the highest bidder. Put that aside, VR can be popular for gaming and content consumption, but the price must be low enough to attract people, even if such low price is achieved by subsidising the cost of the device via gathered user data.

Apple may want to produce a lower cost version of the device but if the highest tech one didn’t attract as much attention, then something has become fundamentally wrong of the entire VR headset produced by Apple.

 

[neutrino17]

The AVP seems successful for what it could do. Production was limited to roughly 500,000 a year due to Sony’s limit on screen production. Rumor has it they’ve sold something like that number.

I think AVP has been great for Apple as it has let them learn how people use this in the real world. Version 2 of the visionOS shows that.

At this price and with limited supply it was never a mass market product. In the science and engineering press I see articles from time to time about how AVP is being used in medicine (surgery) and engineering design.

I’m interested in the M5 version coming out later this year (if true). I can see using this in may lab for a few hours a day. The addition of persistent widgets is very attractive. Considering what it cost for all the other instrumentation and computers and displays the price of the AVP is not burdensome.

You can see other head sets here:

VRcompare - The Internet's Largest VR & AR Headset Database

View and compare prices, specifications, and reviews of VR & AR headsets. Create custom comparisons with our compare tool.

vr-compare.com

I counted over a dozen that are priced at $3k or above.

 

[dcingie]

It will be announced 5 years after the competition, for 5 times the price, and will be another flop.

 

[platinumaqua]

The posts about how "this can't be true" and then multiple paragraphs of 4D chess that explain what Apple is really doing with Vision Pro and how it's "totally not dead" and all of this is completely wrong.

Pretty amazing stuff.

View attachment 2566781

It's an easy way to identify Cook Apple fans or people not old enough to live through the Jobs Apple (v2) era

 

[TheRealAlex]

Yeah they terminated ALL production. Sony has stopped making the dsplays

 

[H_D]

Juuuuust as I was getting interested in the AVP… typical.

 

[Techwatcher]

I firmly believe that Apple will not abandon the AVP. It’s evident that the glasses won’t match the power of the AVP. Everyone desires the power of the AVP in a glasses form, but the technology is simply not ready yet. If it were, Meta would have ceased production of its Quest headsets and simply integrated the power of the Quest 3/3S into their new Meta glasses. However, as you can see, the glasses are limited in their capabilities compared to the Quest 3. Until the glasses technology advances, there’s room for both products.

Best response so far.

 

[Ctrlos]

That's exactly the strategy Microsoft took with their HoloLens product and we know how that ended. It's in the trash bin of history

That lacked anything close to the penetration of Vision Pro. You could never walk into a store and demo and buy HoloLens for example.

I like that Vision Pro even exists because it’s a sign of a company willing to just release some cool **** for a change. Sony used to do this all the time with products like Aibo and Location.Free which weren’t used much but made the company look cool.

In an era of plateauing phones and a lack of daring from any company it was at least a breath of fresh air.

 

[threesixty360]

Didn’t they drop the “Apple Car” (for lack of actual product name) after years of effort and heavy investment, after 0 iterations? If that doesn’t qualify as “next level OS” effort, I don’t know what does, yet it got dropped.

I don’t fault any business that decides to cut their losses due to their own analysis of future market expectations and risks. Some of us are baffled that Apple’s analysis didn’t show the AVP in its present form, should have been shelved, and internal R&D iteration continued instead. Imagine how much further along the path to glasses they might have been.

The physical car isn’t an OS. The long lasting investment is in the platform. They have continued with CarPlay. The just don’t want to make the hardware.

They will make another Vision Pro. A lighter and cheaper one. It’s a product that deserves to exist. To regret its existence is odd and weird. I don’t get why people are so hurt by it? Apple has tons of money for this exact reason. So they can do things like this.

 

[Bigbuddy1]

I'm skeptical of the article for the reasons I stated.



An insatiable media looking for a horse race to drive clicks?



Whatsoever? I disagree. It's a given that:

- Apple has several products in development in the Vision product line (this is not a rumor, this is confirmed by interviews with Mike Rockwell and/or John Ternus and/or Tim Cook)

- Supply chains take several years to plan, and orders have been placed with suppliers to prepare for at least two models of glasses, one with and one without a display, and three models of headsets (M5, Vision Air, and Vision Pro 2). Whether these release on time or get cancelled remain to be seen, but clearly they exist and are being planned for.

- Vision Pro M2 will be in support given Apple's typical 6 year timeline, until early 2030.

- Vision Pro M5 is likely imminent before the end of 2025, given the FCC filing. That brings us to late 2031.

FCC listings doesn’t mean that apple will actually officially release the product as there have been examples of products that made but not released.
The Vision Pro headset is very unlikely going to get a refresh anytime soon as financially it doesn’t make sense for apple as a company to refresh this product every two years or so due to it’s limited market and cost

 

[svish]

Don't mind this at all. Would like Apple to go all in on the glasses. Don't think many will be ready to put on Vision Pro for long periods of time. Glasses are the future and it is better to focus on this.

 

[leifp]

The principal reason I did not purchase a Vision Pro is that the displays within are a touch insufficient to my eyes. Almost all other issues have been resolved with visionOS updates. If this rumour is correct, then I will never purchase such a device from Apple, however I still hold out hope that a true next generation device (the M chip doesn’t matter to me; it would be powered by whatever sits on my desk) fixes my hardware niggles… it would be a certain purchase. Can’t say Day 1 cause I don’t know what my finances will look like on release!

The reasons I require a “2” or whatever it would be called is the above mentioned screens and comfort: I tried it out and I doubt I’d be comfortable wearing the device more than an hour or two before putting it away for a few days, in its present form.

 

[chfilm]

For sure, AVP is not good enough as it is now. It's why I can't get why anyone thinks a cheaper product with a worse quality screen would ever hold water.

they need
- higher display resolution
- better lenses with wider field of view
- better passthrough quality

Without those the price/comfort doesn't even matter. I can't work on a blurry screen where I need to keep turning my head to see parts of it in focus. If I'm taking it off and feeling relief I can see the world clearly again it's not the kind of "vision" I want when we've come so fare with even cheap Hi-DPI displays.

Exactly! I’d pay 5k for this thing if the above issues would be solved to be honest! It’d be just like an xdr display to always bring with you. I never got the „low cost“ approach. Without the processing unit and directly attached to a Mac- sure. But making optical compromises? Hell no!

 

[Th3ChaOsW3aver]

Well thats disappointing. I love mine and use it almost daily.

My biggest issue isnt the hardware or the comfort though, it's the lack of 3rd party apps for it and I cant see that changing any time soon.
Like it's insulting to me how Netflix, Youtube, google earth, etc dont have an app for it and possibly never will.

Even more insulting is how many Apple made apps are just ipad ports. Like I appreciate I can run many ipad apps on my device, but sheesh, the serious lack of purpose built apps is extremely frustrating and disappointing.

For a product that cost me $4500cad, Id expect it to at least have all it's apple designed apps specifically designed to run on vision pro.

In the end I use it mainly as a TV replacement I can wear everywhere in my house and as an external monitor for my Mac. It's a great piece of tech but it does feel to me Apple doesnt care about it.

 

[SteveDmbp]

Well thats disappointing. I love mine and use it almost daily.

My biggest issue isnt the hardware or the comfort though, it's the lack of 3rd party apps for it and I cant see that changing any time soon.
Like it's insulting to me how Netflix, Youtube, google earth, etc dont have an app for it and possibly never will.

Even more insulting is how many Apple made apps are just ipad ports. Like I appreciate I can run many ipad apps on my device, but sheesh, the serious lack of purpose built apps is extremely frustrating and disappointing.

For a product that cost me $4500cad, Id expect it to at least have all it's apple designed apps specifically designed to run on vision pro.

In the end I use it mainly as a TV replacement I can wear everywhere in my house and as an external monitor for my Mac. It's a great piece of tech but it does feel to me Apple doesnt care about it.

Don't own an AVP but tempted after an in store demo so waiting to see if/when it is refreshed with new M4/M5 tweaks.

The lack of dedicated mainstream apps is disappointing, does the iPad Netflix app work on AVP and if so can Netflix content be downloaded to watch offline ?

 

[Th3ChaOsW3aver]

I end up needing to use safari for netflix. It works fine but a dedicated app would be better. I cant get the ipad netflix app to work on it no

 

[The Game 161]

Well thats disappointing. I love mine and use it almost daily.

My biggest issue isnt the hardware or the comfort though, it's the lack of 3rd party apps for it and I cant see that changing any time soon.
Like it's insulting to me how Netflix, Youtube, google earth, etc dont have an app for it and possibly never will.

Even more insulting is how many Apple made apps are just ipad ports. Like I appreciate I can run many ipad apps on my device, but sheesh, the serious lack of purpose built apps is extremely frustrating and disappointing.

For a product that cost me $4500cad, Id expect it to at least have all it's apple designed apps specifically designed to run on vision pro.

In the end I use it mainly as a TV replacement I can wear everywhere in my house and as an external monitor for my Mac. It's a great piece of tech but it does feel to me Apple doesnt care about it.

I’m tempted to pull trigger on M5 Vision Pro and plan to use it for sports and when I’m on my own to watch shows in bed when wife is at work and as a big nba fan think this will work well. Spending this level of money it’s good that the aren’t likely to update it often but my use case won’t need it to be upgraded often anyway

 

[The Game 161]

Don't own an AVP but tempted after an in store demo so waiting to see if/when it is refreshed with new M4/M5 tweaks.

The lack of dedicated mainstream apps is disappointing, does the iPad Netflix app work on AVP and if so can Netflix content be downloaded to watch offline ?

Like with YouTube I believe it only works on safari

 

[JulianL]

If I'm reading the article correctly it's suggesting that Apple's original plan was to follow up the original AVP with a cost-reduced lighter version of essentially the same thing but that it is now pivoting almost entirely towards an Apple Glasses product to compete with the Meta smart glasses. There is a middle ground there though that I haven't ever seen mentioned in the context of an Apple product.

That middle ground is what the likes of XReal and Viture are doing already - something in essentially a regular glasses format but tethered to a device (phone, games console etc). They're not quite like regular glasses - they sit too far off the face and are that bit too bulky for that - but they are certainly a lot lighter to wear and a lot less bulky to travel with compared to AVP (or any other goggle-style headset like Meta Quest 3).

For most of my computer work (big complicated spreadsheets and side-by-side comparison of complex information) I really value having a real monitor (32" in my case) and even a 16" laptop screen feels way too small when travelling so I've been very tempted by those glasses from the likes of XReal and Viture (and a few others) but they still have limitations in terms of resolution and field of view. If Apple came out with a pair of "display glasses" that were light, compact but with higher resolution and wider FoV than current offerings, and that integrated seamlessly into the Apple ecosystem (look at your MacBook to get the screen mirrored etc), that would be a day-one purchase for me. I'm not even sure that I would need the full VisionOS experience in terms of native apps, just a dumb display would work for me with my iPhone, iPad or MacBook doing the OS work, but since I assume it would be tethered to a puck like the AVP is to get sufficient battery life maybe a lightweight VisionOS implementation running on something in the puck would be worthwhile.

For me the use case would be almost entirely to get a big display from a 14" MacBook when travelling but I suspect that with the smaller lighter form factor I might well be tempted to also use them at home for media consumption especially if it did have some VisionOS apps like running on the puck.

Am I in a significant minority here or would others buy such an Apple product? I'm not saying I don't want the genuine wear-all-day, looks-like-regular-glasses smart glasses at some point but it seems to me that this interim step would be less of a challenge to create and would certainly be a day-one purchase for me while waiting to see what comes a few years later.

 

[maflynn]

The physical car isn’t an OS. The long lasting investment is in the platform. They have continued with CarPlay. The just don’t want to make the hardware.

That's not entirely true, it was largely expected at one point that apple was trying to make a car or co-develop one. All of the investment and work wasn't just so they could roll out carplay.

 

[maflynn]

The AVP seems successful for what it could do. Production was limited to roughly 500,000 a year due to Sony’s limit on screen production. Rumor has it they’ve sold something like that number.

What is your measurement of success? That it functions as it was marketed, or units sold? Most people, including the bean counters at apple, use sales numbers and using that well established and accepted measurement, the AVP is largely a flop.

As for the reduction in AVPs - I never heard that it was due to display not being available but rather lack of popularity.
Apple sharply cuts back on Vision Pro production, The Information reports
Apple May Stop Vision Pro Production as Components Pile Up
Apple’s Vision Pro flop: Company scales back production of $3,500 VR headset amid lackluster sales, customer complaints

 

[Schizoid]

Lower the price, throw in a free neck brace and they’ll double sales to about 7

 

[threesixty360]

That's not entirely true, it was largely expected at one point that apple was trying to make a car or co-develop one. All of the investment and work wasn't just so they could roll out carplay.

My point was that they see vision OS as a next level of operating system for productivity and computing in general. They didn’t just make an OS for 1 piece of hardware. Thats very different to something like meta glasses that can barely do anything other than take photos and notifications.

I have a hard time believing Apple were ever going to make a geniune mass market car. They are just not geared up to do that and never have been. Even Samsung and LG aren’t making cars and those guys do everything. It’s a very low margin high cost business. The value could never have been is selling actual cars. The value was always in the OS.

So my point is when has Apple ever abandoned a whole OS 2 yrs after making 1 product. I don’t think it’s ever happened.

 

[maflynn]

I have a hard time believing Apple were ever going to make a geniune mass market car.

There's been enough evidence that they had a team of automotive engineers working for years on this. Look up project Titan, they had about 1,000 employees on this at one point. You don't need 1,000 employees to produce a piece of software.

So my point is when has Apple ever abandoned a whole OS 2 yrs after making 1 product

When you have a flop, the best thing to do is to cancel the thing and Apple completely misread the room with the AVP, high priced, doesn't do anything special, no "killer apps" that would generate interest. The biggest thing people say to justify the 3,500 head wear is watching movies is incredibly immersive. Great if you alone in a room, not really great if you want to watch a movie with your date.

As for hardware being killed off - well there's the Newton and Pippin. They also killed off software initiatives, like OpenDoc, and Quickdraw, Open Transport to name a few.

 

[turbineseaplane]

When you have a flop, the best thing to do is to cancel the thing and Apple completely misread the room with the AVP, high priced, doesn't do anything special, no "killer apps" that would generate interest. The biggest thing people say to justify the 3,500 head wear is watching movies is incredibly immersive. Great if you alone in a room, not really great if you want to watch a movie with your date.

I agree, and I think these rumors support the notion that they've done essentially exactly that.

I realize some don't want to hear anything hinting at that, but I suspect the redirection of resources to attempt some glasses is exactly that. (effectively an AVP cancellation .. at least for the foreseeable future)