I'm torn between buying one to tuck away in a secure, dark, dry location for 16 years to sell for $1.4M (the original iPhone sold for 400x it's selling price at auction last summer) to be my retirement nestegg or if it's going to be a bit of a flop and will never garner the prices the original iPhone is getting after 16 years. I don't think we have seen the original iPad sell as well as the iPhone, which was a cultural phenomenon. I see a new-in-box iPad 1st gen on Ebay right now for about $12,000. Still decent, but not life changing. A key difference with the Vision Pro is that it will be much more supply constrained than either the iPhone or iPad at launch, which could make finding unopened ones more rare. But we also now live in a society of people who tuck away unopened items more often to resell later, so who knows.
I think this device may be looked at one day as the beginning of a new age of computing, but I'm not sure if it will have the same emotional attachment as the iPhone or be as impactful as the iPhone was at the time for a device that felt like it fell out of the future. This thing is cool, but seems like more of a fun toy/entertainment/consumption device. And it does not look cool like the iPhone did. I remember people coming up to me in public all the time to ask about my launch iPhone. I remember in college a girl came over and sat next to me on the shuttle to chat me up about the iPhone and tried to ask me on a date (I don't think I went on the date, I think I was seeing someone else at the time). Just because of a freaking phone. It was that big of a deal. I can't imagine wearing this in public and having the same effect, especially with the creepy eyes on the front. And I also can't imagine getting much work done on this, especially with a limited first gen OS and two hour battery life.
I hope Apple doesn't cancel it and sticks with it for the long run. I think there is some potential there to make it into a sleek platform, and as someone who wears glasses already, I would love for a lightweight form factor to replace traditional dumb glasses. I'm looking forward to trying it out in the store sometime. But at $3500 and with only an M2 chip, 256GB storage, clunky head straps supporting a heavy device, and two hours of battery life—it just seems kinda lame? For that price you can get great MacBook Pro. This is more for people who have money to blow and already own everything else.
I feel like with a lot of Apple devices the time to buy seems to be around the third generation. The third gen iPod added the iconic touch wheel and double the storage. The iPhone 3GS felt like the first real iPhone with speed, video recording, fairly clear camera, copy/paste, etc. The iPad 3 was kind of a rehash of the iPad 2 but with retina display and didn't run that well but the iPad 2 and iPad 4 were great so that one is an outlier but close enough. The Apple Watch Series 3 is where the Apple Watch seemed to come into it's own with decent battery life and an SoC that finally seemed capable enough to handle things and run apps locally, as well as adding cellular connectivity for the first time. And lastly the M3 chips in the MacBook Pros, which I was personally waiting for, were worth the wait to get beyond some of the early issues on the M1 series and growing pains as apps transitioned off of Intel, and specifically the M3 Max chip that I have significantly blows away the performance of the M1 Max and M2 Max which weren't much different from each other (12500 and 14500 in GeekBench vs 21000 for the M3 Max).
So while this thing is gonna be pretty cool by the third gen, I don't think it's going to be a killer product until sometime in the early to mid 2030s as chips continue to shrink and battery tech continues to advance and it can be more of a glasses type experience. I also wouldn't be surprised if by autumn this $3500 device suddenly becomes a $1500-2000 SE device with no external creepy eyes (Apple needs a mass-market version they can sell for a couple more years so devs will make apps). The new Vision Pro 2 releases with an M4 chip, hopefully M4 Pro on 3nm+ with 3 hours of battery, and then in autumn 2025 they will release the Vision Pro 3 with an M5 Pro on 2nm and maybe it will get 4 hours of battery and there will be enough apps, games, OS feature upgrades, and performance for it to be worthwhile. I know I won't be considering it until at least the third gen!
www.macrumors.com
