Apple’s highly anticipated Vision Pro mixed reality headset, which goes up for pre-order on Friday and hits stores on February 2, has been officially announced for US customers only. We assume it will eventually come to the UK and other countries, but no time frame has been given so far for a wider release.
According to a new report, however, it could happen a little sooner than expected. In a Medium article published Tuesday, noted analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicts that Vision Pro will likely launch outside the United States before WWDC 2024, which will likely take place in June. That gives us an upper bound of four months of delay, and potentially a little less given that Apple won’t want media coverage of the wider launch to turn into publicity for WWDC. Could Apple make the announcement during its traditional spring event in March/April? That might be pushing things.
For comparison, the first generation iPhone was released in the United States in June 2007, the European launch followed in November of the same year (five months later), and several major international markets had to wait until the following year . Canadian consumers ended up completely ignoring the first generation and had to wait for the second generation iPhone 3G model.
The reasoning behind Kuo’s prediction concerns Vision Pro’s operating system, visionOS. After all, WWDC focuses primarily on operating systems, and Apple will want to use this year’s conference to promote visionOS and encourage software developers to write applications for it. A device like this lives and dies by the quality of its third-party software ecosystem.
“If Apple could release Vision Pro in non-US markets before WWDC 2024,” says Kuo, “it would be beneficial to promote the global visionOS development ecosystem.” More people wearing Vision Pro headsets means more people buying apps and more motivation for developers to devote their time and resources to creating apps.
It’s a good idea, but as always with large-scale launches, there are plenty of issues that could force Apple to delay further. Kuo cites three factors as to why the company initially launched only in the United States: limited inventory; regulatory differences between countries and the need to adjust software algorithms to account for them; and want to see if the sales process goes smoothly in the United States before expanding the scope of the product. Problems with any of these factors, such as poor initial rollout, logistical difficulties caused by the long demo, or simply low sales numbers, could force Apple to think again about when to launch outside the states -United.