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Cheaper Apple Vision Headset Might Require a Tethered iPhone or Mac
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Maybe Apple needs to consider the size of their profit margins when trying to launch into a new tech that isn’t as universally appealing as music or mobile phones…
I think it’s beginning to show that Apple have become too big and too entangled with the stock markets to be able to actually innovate…
I think it’s beginning to show that Apple have become too big and too entangled with the stock markets to be able to actually innovate…
Tech is a hobbie for a lot yes
no different to car people or people obsessed with different watches or bags.
The watch is pretty much tethered. If its wired or wireless it could be great, I'd happily take my work and laptop outside in the garden and take an extra screen with me via the VP.
The smaller field of view would be a deal breaker.
Makes sense.
Pretty much every Vision Pro user has at least a mac or an iPhone.
Still, I'm not interested in vision pro.
The fact I wear special lenses sure doesn't make it any easier, and I genuinely dislike contacts.
Pretty much every Vision Pro user has at least a mac or an iPhone.
Still, I'm not interested in vision pro.
The fact I wear special lenses sure doesn't make it any easier, and I genuinely dislike contacts.
Their profit margin probably isn’t as disgusting as you think it is. The bill of materials is around $1600; the Micro OLED screens, for example, are $450. Then there are the costs of manufacturing, packaging, shipping, training employees, project manager and employee salaries and costs, years of a new type of interaction development, OS development, and hardware R&D. So apple has to recover all these costs while still having it be profitable to continue developing the platform.
Apple Vision (or, rather, Apple's vision of AR) does feel a bit like the new Newton: a decade or two down the line, people will be rocking their lightweight wrap-around digital shades while old-timers are pointing out how ahead of its time Apple Vision was and if only they'd had the tech to implement it properly...
Of course, the Newton is part of the reason we're rocking our smartphones today, if only because Apple invested in improving ARM to produce the Newton's CPU...
Source?
The cost price of electronic components is hugely dependent on how many you order, and Apple is probably one of the biggest buyers of computer components in the world, so they have huge negotiating power. Whatever price they pay will be "commercially sensitive information" and is unlikely to be released by any reputable source. Any published one-off, retail or small business price you find will likely be much higher, and at best will let you put an upper limit on the BOM.
Also, how large companies reconcile R&D costs is far from straightforward. Even at the small beer, Mom & Pop, few thousand bucks level there are "efficient" ways of spreading debts and revenue over time. I doubt that Apple works out their prices based on BOM + % margin - they choose specific price points based on the markets they want to sell to (unless you think that the BOM for, say, an Apple Silicon MacBook Air was, magically, exactly the same as the old Intel model). Some companies might sell something like the Vision Pro at a loss to test/pump-prime the market or promote services - although I don't think Apple would roll that way!
I like it, but Futurama did the same thing way back when with the eyePhoneI would have gone with iPatch myself, but yours is more subtly nautical.
According to some reports the VisionOS has a relatively low overlap with the other OS teams. The custom software stack for Vision shares substantially less than the other platforms do. ( perhaps that was driven by being a relatively long term 'secret' project and now they can unwind a bit because it 'public'. If it was a detached team to help keep it more secret then perhaps that can be wound down. Talk of split/tethered processors then not so much. )
The cost sharing for the R1 is about at $0.00 since not used in any other product and effectively runs a different software stack. This is custom chip that is running at a sub 1M/year run rate. The 'bill of materials' cost for that is a joke. It is no where near the real costs. Until Apple can get the run count of the R-series high enough that processor is going to drive prices higher.
Even if Apple moved the main application processor to a Mac/iPhone the R1 (or R-series) cost would still be there. It wouldn't lower much of the R-series costs with a higher run rate that doesn't move. ( e.g., made a 'dumb' monitor with no 'vision' with no R-series chip at all. ). A major factor for the more affordable headset is likely to get the production run rate of the R-series much higher. ( Unless Apple finds another product to help hugely boost deployments with. )
The vision pro is not 'huge'. Lots of substantially costly parts there are unique to Vision Pro. M2 is used elsewhere but the R1 is absolutely not. Screens? not. Headbands ? not. battery pack not. gesture control with hand ... not.
Other companies selling for a loss on purpose is not 'accounting' or 'reconciling' for R&D costs'. It accounts for some of the price anchoring disconnects between folks conditioned to Meta selling headsets at a loss to 'buy' market share ( $500 ). Do that for a relatively long period of time then those folks get disconnected from what real costs are.
Similar to how folks thought Apple could sell 9-10x less SoC processors than Intel and still think the SoCs were going to come out much chearper than Intel CPUs for laptops/desktops. Apple sells each iPhone for 3 years to get volume ( and tosses that processor into other 'hand me down' products to get even more volume. ). The M-series reuse some cluster function units , but the on chip network, die masks , level of verification difficulty , etc are all much different for a substantially lower volume of production ( and for larger dies for much relatively shorter amounts of product deployment time. Who gets "Ultra" hand-me-down SoC.? Nothing so far. )
It may not be selling in iPhone numbers, but it's not a cottage industry: the rumoured "disappointing" sales figures are still in the hundreds of thousands - it's not like they're just making a few hundred prototypes. Plus, it is likely that many of the companies that manufacture those parts also make iPhone parts (or would like to) so Apple is in a strong bargaining position.
The question is still how anybody can reliably know the cost prices of those custom components.
Intel's sales may be 10x larger in total, but they're spread over scores of different SKUs with different core counts, cache, TDP, GPU options (and that's just the i-series, not counting the Xeons and budget celerons/whatever) ... and Apple weren't always buying the most popular models.
Apple are only making 3-4 fundamentally different SoCs per generation - regular, Pro, Max and Ultra - with a few variants obtained by disabling cores or fitting different RAM chiplets to the package - and who knows what their financial arrangements with TSMC are?
Apple may be lagging way behind HP, Dell and Lenovo int terms of PC sales - but have you seen the mess of different models and ranges on the Big 3's websites - all with different CPUs, GPUs, RAM types, screens keyboards...? It makes you nostalgic for the Mac Performa! Apple's Mac sales are spread over a much smaller range of actual models, so they should be getting pretty impressive economies of scale on the parts for each individual model. Plus, I bet they do it with 72.5% less committee meetings than Intel...
Apple moved from Intel to M-series chips without significantly increasing prices - so it doesn't seem very likely that M-series are costing them significantly more than Intel.
Each generation is using the same CPU, GPU core designs, media engine, TB/USB/Display drivers etc. some of which has also been developed for the iPhone, and while, no, you don't just copy and paste those to make a new chip it does mean that large chunks of R&D have already been done. Plus - although this has changed with the M3 - the M1/M2 Pro, Max and Ultra shared exactly the same die design. True, they had to be manufactured separately, but if there weren't significant time & cost savings from re-using designs like that someone wasn't doing their job.
No. The Vision Pro components benefits all of the XR market and enables components like the micro-OLED display be faster available to a cheaper Vison headset and even non-headset products like the Watch and AR glasses.
This approach made sense because the economies of scale benefits and the people still enthused and willing to pay for XR headsets at all being a more expensive computing platform than traditional computing platforms ARE prosumers and VR enthusiasts than average people understanding this + NO option to date for non-gaming XR use cases that NEEDS to be more expensive than the medicore gaming headsets that have abysmal PPI and dom even have HDR like Apple’s other pro hardware to watch/make premium content on.
Why would Apple make a headset first not compatible with their prosumer hardware with that audience the most willing to afford and want a headset in the first place?
Medicore gaming headsets have tempered expectations and demand by mainstream audiences; those budget headers cannot even be invested in to make games on par with non-VR current gen games curving. the enthusiasm of AAA gamers: Paying hundreds more (if not double and triple) to play lesser games than without the hardware.
Meta has lost 4 billion dollars that way primarily willingly to support their infamous Metaverse aspirations.
Apple and their stakeholders are not interested in going that direction and losing money per headset when many have went that direction with no great ROI for it.
HCI again has long showed spatial computing needs to fundamentally be more expensive than traditional computing platforms to derive maximum benefits of the platform over traditional computing platform.
Apple is providing a headset that finally allows XR users a meaningful XR headset to use beyond gaming necessary for the market to grow beyond gaming which most people do with prosumers previously not having no serious standalone XR headset option.
The Quest Pro and Microsoft’s equivalent failed to meet conventional expectations for prosumers to have a headset on par with other prosumer hardware from Apple, Asus (Pro Art), Dell, and others: Neither has a picture quality of 4K+ or even premium m/baseline HDR support (Dolby Vision, VESA 1000) for creative professionals.
There’s more content and things to do on computing platforms than games—especially games not even on par with current-gen or past-gen gaming with maybe less than a handful of exceptions not nearly enough for AAA gamers to spend thousands on VR and higher priced games VR gaming needs to be for that to consistently happen.
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Display like that cost $2500+ including the medicore Studio Display.
The cheaper Vision will probably cut back on HDR but Apple probably learned from the Studio Display’s middling reception for having abysmal HDR by creative professionals it was designed for not to do that again to be fair.
Accordingly it was not launched first or alongside the Vision Pro to be made later as expected when they launched with the Vision Pro wisely playing the long-term game without losing money on a computing platform more expensive than traditional computing platforms when the average person’s buying power is greatly reduced and people are conservative to invest in such platforms as early adopters.
The more appropriate early adopters were always prosumers that Apple and OG Oculus was correct targeting.
Making a non-standalone version adds up being not as convenient as a pro but n/a for average people who can benefit from the basic core functionality of being a great private secondary screen the average person easily understands.
Quest headsets uses a mobile-phone-class APU, so this tethered headset makes sense for that audience without Apple sacrificing so much on picture quality as that gaming headset hopefully consistent with their entire product lineup once they all got high PPI displays.
Apple probably want all their headset hardware to not be a dramatically inferior way to compute in picture quality to their traditional computing hardware.
This makes perfect sense
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…Whether Thunderbolt 5 or Wifi 6E/7, the bandwidth is there for a display only headset wirelessly or not.
Having a STANDALONE headset with a laptop-class APU still unmatched by anything in the market necessitates the power arrangement of the Vision Pro anyone tech literate about the complexity of what Apple accomplished this year can understand.
Let’s see someone even bothers to make a high-end XR headset this year with the same class APU and computing power can accomplish better engineering.
I have a hunch that’s not going to happen—especially not with this economy or the supply chain constraints of the competition the past 4-5 years.
Apple has enabled higher-end component for the XR headset marketing by entering the market, the wait can’t be too long if others are actually serious offering alternate high-end XR headsets.
Netflix and Amazon Prime works on Vision Pro just fine through Safari and native apps like Supercut just fine.
A more convenient way of using it at times and contexts than the iPad Pro (I know having it and the M4 iPad Pro for myself and use studies) and the barebones UI of the Amazon Prime apps especially
This is ignorant of the capabilities of the Vision Pro having a laptop-class APU that will always be better than current iPhones (and probably the next one)
It has 5000 peak nits with its OLED screen and enables 3D movie functionality + size/viewing-distance flexibility with its canvas a phone cannot compete with.
You clearly haven’t used a Vision Pro extensively.
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So we agree. It's a $3500 monitor for one person, with a tethered battery that has only 2 hours of life, no built-in input abilities (like a keyboard) to be productive, and it is - at best - a 'stand alone' media consumption device, but with no native media apps from the major players to provide any additional functionality beyond a safari screen.
No one is having trouble with 'peak nits' on a new iphone and what's the point of a 'laptop-class APU' if the device cannot be used for productivity because it's only inputs are voice and crab-hands?
It might be the most technically advanced headset, or even device, ever invented. But you can't do anything with it other than watch netflix in safari.
The problem isn't the price, it's the fact that it is just a monitor. It doesn't allow you to do anything that you couldn't already do with another device. It is less portable, less efficient, less convenient and more expensive than just buying a MPB and an iPad, and you cannot perform even a fraction of the tasks because of the lack of input.
Absolutely right. I’m still surprised and amused by the number of posts wanting to talk about the specs of the current AVP or spec changes to “improve it” and drive up sales without ever describing a single use case that would compel average consumers to buy it and use it regularly. Media consumption and “floating monitor” are pretty much it. If neither Apple nor any of the AVP “cheerleaders” can describe any other use for the masses, the specs mean nothing.
“And now, with our groundbreaking Apple Vision SE, you can interface symbiotically with any paired iPhone or MacBook Pro”.
…Your lack of experience with the device is tremendously showing. Your statements about inputs the Vision Pro supports are absolutely false.
It seems you haven’t used the device extensively whatsoever:
Like the iPad which it shares apps with, it supports all bluetooth keyboards was well as trackpads (1.0) and mice (2.0) when used in standalone modes in addition to whatever input devices connected to Macs when you have their input and video transferred to the Vision Pro (including trackball mice and space mouse)
The Vison Pro can be indefinitely connected to be on for as long as you like with or without a power bank.
It has creative professional level HDR and color support to work by itself for with Apple’s other prosumer hardware by design.
It absolutely reduces the need to use an iPad Pro in many cases and it certainly can be more convenient and contextually appropriate to use than a iPad, phone, and Macbook/Mac Pro.
For example it is better than the iPad in a wide variety of ways for 2nd screen use cases in addition to being able to consume/render 3D movies at professional quality.
Hands only navigation makes a variety of computing use cases like reference tasks trivial that you can’t do so as well with a phone or iPad for example. Whether that’s cooking or multitasking in a matter you don’t have both hands available at the same time—able to consume or be productive with one hand or have both hands not occupied with a physical input device while occupied but still benefiting from computing tech is invaluable (important for the OS’s use for AR glasses as well)
It is a more convenient means to compute in tight spaces than all of Apple’s other devices with its 5K (standalone), 4K (when mirroring Intel or amd Macs today), or 5K2K Ultrawide (2.0) modes
It also is invaluable to compute privately in a matter you cannot with Apple’s other prosumer hardware.
It obviously supports XR/AR experiences like WebVR and 3D content in a matter the other Apple products cannot like WebXR experiences. This is meaningful for people with great spatial memory/intelligence which makes the computing platform appealing.
It doesn’t have hardware ray-tracing which is its glaring gap between M3+ Apple devices besides TBD compatibility with Apple Intelligence besides its existing use of AI via its neural engine with its M2 chip.
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The device is not for most people and it’s entitlement and arbitrary to claim it was.
No Apple Pro product is for most people—not even the iPhone Pro.
Given the mediocre success gaming headsets have had with mediocre/modest gaming headsets that have lost Meta 4 billion dollars and losing money per headset (subsidizing in hopes of a long term ROI for their metaverse and other latent reasons).
XR computing is fundamentally a more advanced and expensive computing platform than traditional computing.
In addition to accommodating an established demographic they have served across several device categories better than most, Apple accordingly is likely wisely accommodating prosumers first to have a very sound and safe initial investment in the XR market.
The Vision Pro also enables components previous unavailable to lower-end headsets be viable to them and even for non-VR devices such as AR glasss and the Apple Watch such as the well regarded MicroOLED display it used with stellar HDR performance (5000 nits + Dolby Vision & HLG HDR support).
true
most of these new products or advanced tech isn't for most people. foldables for example isn't for most people either.
Vision Pro is a multitasking beast from what I've seen. the way it can connect with your MacBook certainly opens far more windows than you can get anywhere else. obviously media content is where it shines and if all the main sport companies and apps support it in UK for me it's worth it for that alone.
if apple can get the cheaper model down to 1500 I think it would sell greatly.