Apple has certainly created a market for itself by selling extremely well-made products at ridiculously high prices. With an audience willing to spend exorbitant amounts of money on their laptops and phones, it's perhaps not surprising that the company expected to do the same thing in the cursed world with its $3,500 Vision Pro mixed reality glasses which VR could achieve. However, according to sources, this was not possible. The Vision Pro will no longer be produced.
This is all based on a report from October 2024 The information (a site that conveniently charges $300 to $1,000 a year to read its articles), which claimed, based on multiple sources, that Apple would stop producing the Vision Pro at the end of the year given the backlog of unsold devices. There have also been rumors that a cheaper model will go into production instead of a previously planned second version of the Pro, possibly for a late 2025 release.
The Vision Pro's failure to set the world on fire is perhaps somewhat predictable. Not only does absolutely no one want mixed reality headsets for their work life, but more importantly, they don't want to pay the price of a used car for the honor. At $3.5k, you'd have to hope that the Vision Pro would have a number of absolutely essential apps and applications, but that wasn't the case either.
Already in October, The information said its sources at component makers told the site they had delivered enough parts for over half a million headsets, with “tens of thousands of undelivered parts” filling suppliers' warehouses. At the time, Apple was said to have sold 370,000 Vision Pros – a number that seems extremely optimistic, but supposedly represents only two-thirds of the inventory manufactured. Compare that to the millions of units Meta has sold of its Meta Quest VR headsets at a seventh of the price of Apple's technology.
If all of this turns out to be true, that means Apple will stop making new Vision Pros from now on because not enough people saw a reason to pay such a high price for such a completely unnecessary piece of technology. As MacRumors points outApple had reportedly originally asked its Chinese manufacturer to expect to produce eight million Vision Pros, meaning the company likely sold a twentieth of its original expectations. The reports say Apple has told the manufacturer to expect to produce half as many for the next, cheaper version of the AR headset, indicating a massive drop in expectations even at a cheaper price, but always still seems ridiculously unlikely.
Meta's relative success with the Quest VR headsets in 2024 is likely due to Meta finding the affordable price point of $300 to $500 where people are more willing to bet on a piece of unproven technology. Apple could arguably still find its niche in this space if it can get prices down to $1,000 and capture the business market that feels compelled to rely on gimmicks, resulting in overworked people in fancy suits are forced to watch virtual Power Point demonstrations until they quit their jobs and take up macrame.
We've reached out to Apple for comment.
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