Apple cuts Vision Pro shipments as demand falls 'sharply beyond expectations'

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/04/23/apple-cuts-vision-pro-shipments/

by mfiguiere • 2 years ago

100 127 2 years ago

VHRanger• 2 years ago

It seems like it's been 3 decades and no one ever learns the lesson that normal people don't want to put a computer on their face. It's a weird thing to do.

As for productivity, typing would have to... work...? For this product to be useful.

Otherwise, VR remains a gaming product.

we_love_idf• 2 years ago

We are talking about Apple, the company that has changed humanity forever. So if any compancy can make it happen, It will be Apple.

bogwog• 2 years ago

You sound like a real Crazy One™®©

HexDecOctBin• 2 years ago

The only companies that can be considered to have changed humanity are the various European East Indian Companies. Apple is not even close to that ballpark.

latentcall• 2 years ago

changed humanity forever

Yeah for the worse.

ardit33• 2 years ago

unfortunately, AVP has ignored gaming altogether (to apple it is an annoyance). At least it could have had some kind of push forward of the industry in that front. The resolution is not yet good enough for work either. The only thing that it does well right now is laid back video/media entertainment, and that's it.

minimaxir2• 2 years ago

Chicken-and-egg problem. There won't be VR games that take full advantage of the AVP unless there's enough of a market for them.

Given how badly the PSVR 2 flopped, it may be too risky for game devs currently.

dwaite2• 2 years ago

I don't think they ignored gaming; they just knew they would fail if they designed a gaming-first device.

Their best bet to bootstrap the platform is to make it computing-first around the iPad platform, and that means leading with multitasking, AR/MR, and with computing-oriented inputs.

snapcaster8• 2 years ago

What do you mean the resolution isn't good enough for work? I haven't had any issues reading or viewing content in it

jjeaff2• 2 years ago

Seems like a pretty large market of people who want to watch something in bed while their partner sleeps or watches something else. but it would need to be a lot cheaper for just that use.

yunwal• 2 years ago

This feels like a thing where Apple needs to be very clear on who their early adopters are. The only situation I could see myself wanting this is if I was on a plane/train for several hours a day and needed to work or just wanted a good place for entertainment.

Seems like they haven’t really pinned that crowd down though and not being able to have multiple virtual monitors is a sales killer imo.

germinalphrase• 2 years ago

Cost (and style… and comfort… and…) aside, I can’t see spatial computing taking off until co-located experiences become well refined.

For instance, can a small group of people play a table top game together where half are in the room, half are remote, and the experience feels quite fluid.

oneepic• 2 years ago

This is a repeat of the HoloLens, which I'm sure is a repeat of other failures, but I lack the historical context.

snapcaster8• 2 years ago

I used the Hololens it was pretty janky. I will say the AVP is the first device I used that nailed the AR interaction/display stuff PERFECTLY. It really is just lacking the software ecosystem but they've got the fundamentals worked out at least. I'm hopeful it doesn't die and keeps getting developed

jameshart• 2 years ago

HoloLens didn’t fail, it just changed:

https://defensescoop.com/2023/09/21/army-awards-microsoft-95...

andrewmthomas87• 2 years ago

This thing makes me want to more than anything before.

But, not at that price.

vundercind• 2 years ago

Yep. Not tempted by other headsets at $400 or whatever. I’ve tried them, had access to them for free, still they just gathered dust.

Might be tempted by this one… at like $1,500. Maybe.

At $800 (I know, no way given the BOM cost alone) I’d probably already have one.

averyvery• 2 years ago

A lot of people have made a lot of money arguing that users want immersive computing, and the more immersive it is, the more they'll pay for it — therefore, the next biggest VR product is gonna be The Big One. It doesn't seem like it's going to pay off.

seanmcdirmid4• 2 years ago

Many people want immersive computing, for sure.

But whether today's technology can actually deliver that (at any price point) is what everyone is arguing about.

jjeaff2• 2 years ago

Can't you just use a physical keyboard?

brigadier1322• 2 years ago

It costs too much.

gchokov• 2 years ago

way too much

boringg• 2 years ago

Low value + high cost is a tough sales even for a company with a pretty impressive brand quality. That said I am interested to see the third iteration and where that lands.

cjk2• 2 years ago

Meh. I think it's about the right price for the quality.

However I can't think of any actual applications for it that would have a return on investment which means it's not worth spending that money. Literally everything it does can be done better elsewhere for less money.

hackeraccount• 2 years ago

I disagree. It delivers too little for the cost. I'm sure you could sell a $3,500.00 face computer but it's got to deliver more - smaller, lighter, faster, etc. - then this does.

brigadier1322• 2 years ago

I disagree. It delivers too little for the cost

I feel like this is a rephrasing of the same thing. If it delivers too little for the cost it costs too much.

PreachSoup• 2 years ago

I am amazed that they even have the expectations in the first place

Terretta4• 2 years ago

They didn't. Following launch week, the number was revised upward from below this new number based on the pace of sales in launch week.

They seem to have misestimated the number of folks deliberately purchasing to blog or YouTube about it then return it.

Freedom2• 2 years ago

If you read the HackerNews thread then it was announced, it was widely claimed this was the next big thing. Very curious how so many got it wrong.

shtopointo• 2 years ago

Still amazing that they would get to 400k.

georgeecollins• 2 years ago

Maybe for the price point, but Occulus has sold like 10x as many quests. There are a lot of people who like VR for gaming, exercise and chat.

I think the Vision is too expensive and has too little software support.

jbverschoor2• 2 years ago

Quest 2: 20 million (installs?) from oct'20 - q1'23, so lets say 2.5 years. (makes sense, Qualcomm said 10m in dec'21)

Quest 3 Sold an Estimated 900K-1.5 Million Units in Q4 2023.

Vision Pro is nice and all, but it's such a high price to pay although you're essentially buying a macbook pro. Still, in terms of revenue is still $1.4B for the quarter

snapcaster8• 2 years ago

Yeah I'm the only person I know who has one (I know one other buyer but they returned it). I'm honestly shocked it's over 100k sold since I feel like i'm in a pretty tech-early-adopter bubble

bugbuddy2• 2 years ago

This proves that there are at least 400k die-hard-price-insensitive Apple enthusiasts who are willing to spend that much for Apple’s latest gadgets. If I was Apple’s executive, I would double down on more high-priced novel products, even niche ones, that integrate in various ways to the Apple ecosystem.

nojvek• 2 years ago

400k is a pretty small number. Apple spent years on VisionPro with a large team.

This means so they are likely in the red (unprofitable) on VisionPro.

This ignores the opportunity cost of the VisionPro team working on something else.

Apple could have made normal fashionable glasses with a screen aka The Apple Watch / Apple AirPods strategy - but for eyes.

But they went the heavy ski mask strategy with 2 hour battery life.

donio• 2 years ago

That's a projection for the rest of the year and probably still way optimistic. It's quite possible that the current trend is for a much smaller number.

minimaxir2• 2 years ago

Wasn't this also the case with the Apple Watch back in 2015? The hardware there was a 1st-generation dud too.

pbharrin• 2 years ago

This product is more like the Apple Newton than the watch.

nozzlegear4• 2 years ago

I'm sure you could go back to the launch of the Apple Watch and find comments saying it was more like the Apple Newton.

bombcar• 2 years ago

From what I remember the number of people who bought a watch was small, but they wore it.

The problem with AVP is that the people who DID buy it can't manufacture reasons to USE it. Apple needed to have a very strong push out of the gate with new content weekly.

webworker• 2 years ago

The only reason I have an Apple Watch today is because I 1) broke my iPhone when the waterproof case I had failed, and 2) sale on amazon pushing it below $200. If the watch waterproofing fails, it's a lot less catastrophic than an iPhone would be.

I only use the watch when surfing or doing mountain biking. It's still not all that great of a device, and not much (in a practical sense) has changed since 2015. Limited functionality and what is there is frustrating to use, especially while in action.

tiffanyh• 2 years ago

$1B in AVP sales.

I wonder what Apple's sales expectations were for AVP.

$1B in revenue for a brand new product that's only been out for 2.5 months seems a massive success to me [0].

But then again, at Apple's scale - $1B isn't much.

https://www.proactiveinvestors.com/companies/news/1045835/ap...

hot_gril• 2 years ago

"Apple has cut its 2024 Vision Pro shipments to 400–450k units (vs. market consensus of 700–800k units or more)"

Terretta4• 2 years ago

The expectation pre-launch was in the 150K - 250K range. It revised upward based on pace of sales in launch weeks, which I think was thrown off by the number of people buying to review and return.

Market consensus went through the roof based on pace of initial sales then those numbers stuck, but some Apple numbers at the time seemed to suggest this same 400K range.

matsemann2• 2 years ago

I wonder how many bought one just to blog or make a video about it to gain on the hype, only to not use it further (possibly even returning it).

CodeWriter23• 2 years ago

Huh. For something that presents more like an engineering prototype than a product, who woulda thought?

wdb• 2 years ago

Waiting for it to go on sale where I live

tombert5• 2 years ago

Yeah I can't imagine why something that cost $3500 that was heavy and required an external battery pack that had almost no reason to exist would sell poorly.

VR is cool but it's not "$3500 for a toy" cool, at least not for me and I think not for most people.

darth_avocado• 2 years ago

$3500 before taxes or accessories to keep it safe

tombert5• 2 years ago

This might just be the cynic in me, but people walking around with a $3500+ item attached to their face just screams "rob me!"

I mean, I got my comparatively-cheaper 2-year-old iPhone 12 Pro Max stolen from me about a year ago in a mugging, and that wasn't even nearly as flagrant. A person who wants to mug someone sees someone wearing an Apple Vision Pro, and they know that this person has a $3500 item glued to their face, as well probably an expensive iPhone in their pocket as well.

dsabanin• 2 years ago

I think Apple was out of touch releasing such an expensive product with such niche use cases in the current times. If they wanted us to become early adopters and proof-of-concept testers, they should've subsidized the cost, to grow the market while working on improving the device.

sneak3• 2 years ago

It’s a dev kit.

jbverschoor2• 2 years ago

The AppleTV dev kit was $1 :-)

sp332• 2 years ago

Then why be surprised that demand dried up?

monocasa2• 2 years ago

Apple has released dev kits before. Most recently the apple silicon devkits. Those have pretty much universally been explicit and have come with a requirement to return the devkits once consumer hardware capable of being development hardware is released.

They were hoping for consumer (or industry) acceptance. They visibly did not get that.

matsemann2• 2 years ago

Then ship it opened up, but perhaps more unpolished, to devs. Right now I think it's lack of success is that it's inbetween both. It's useless as a dev kit, too polished and locked down. Useless as a consumer unit when no one makes things for it.

While Oculus didn't take off, the DK1 had a massive hype and a large community building stuff.

sschueller• 2 years ago

Google used to give hardware away for free at Google io. If you want me to write software for you device I ain't paying for it.

xyst2• 2 years ago

subsidized the cost

This isn’t Amazon. There is no 10 or 20 year vision. These Fortune 500 companies only have visions that last a couple of years, and in some cases a few quarters.

tim3332• 2 years ago

They probably will work on improving the device and the next version will be cheaper as tech improves. I'm not sure it's a bad strategy.

xyst2• 2 years ago

A first gen, $4K (minimum) piece of equipment didn’t live up to its hype.

Who could have predicted this?!

It’s a good looking piece of tech, but unfortunately like the rest of the Apple ecosystem. It’s locked down. It’s out of reach (price wise) for most people. The mandatory App Store from a user perspective is dead to me.

Repair process looks painful.

Facebook and Apple need to change their shit up. Open up the ecosystem. Let users load up their own OS/Apps. Stop tying it down to your locked down ecosystems and warranty programs. Give us root, build schematics, and let us build.

Stop abusing your users and developers.

dmitrygr3• 2 years ago

If you were right and THAT was what users cared about AND acted accordingly, android would own the majority of the high-end phone market. It doesn’t.

syklep• 2 years ago

It does, except in the US, where iMessage and other lock-in tactics help cement their stranglehold

infotainment2• 2 years ago

Ehh, the Vision Pro is positioned as a Real Computer™ in a way that smartphones aren’t.

A more accurate comparison, IMO, would be the iPad’s performance in the overall laptop market.

ado__dev3• 2 years ago

Android has ~70% of the global smartphone marketshare.

Personally, I've moved off of Android to Apple in 2019 because I was done with tinkering and just wanted a device that worked well (even if locked down in an ecosystem).

CrimsonCape• 2 years ago

It's really mind boggling with all of the money they earn why they can't fund a sort of "open source skunkworks" where a team is dedicated to building open source tooling that can create a symbiotic relationship with the dev community. And of course, be back-fed into their own products.

Microsoft does this sort-of with language development (C#) and VS code on the software side. Now imagine a Microsoft "VSCode Box" or "VSCode portable", i.e. a hardware device they could sell that builds upon the OS work.

In my example, Microsoft has the software side but not the hardware. Currently Apple has the hardware side but not the software.

worldwidelies• 2 years ago

This is peak capitalism. The middle class is almost no existent. Big companies are making products that regular people can't afford. It's kinda like the time workers at the old Ford plants couldn't afford the cars that they were making. Eventually they started paying their employees enough to do so. I just looked up the price of a base model Jeep Wrangler, it's 31K, probably closer to 38K out the door(financed of course). That's a lot of money. I wonder if the average factory worker can TRULY afford the base model version of the vehicle they help assemble.

underseacables2• 2 years ago

Give me Daemon operative glasses and we can talk, but the Apple Helmet is not it.

nozzlegear4• 2 years ago

Daniel Suarez's Daemon? If so, count me in!

underseacables2• 2 years ago

YES! That is the tech we should be racing towards. I dream of having a pair of glasses that can display information for me a la Google Glass but not so obvious. I also wish I could record everything I see, and have software analyze it for me later picking out things I might have missed. Creepy and unsettling to everyone else, but I would love it.

snapcaster8• 2 years ago

I actually really enjoy mine, and having fun learning how to do iOS/VR development. That being said, until it can run MacOS apps I can't really replace my laptop (instead have to connect it to the AVP). Assuming that's a software limitation and not something that requires upgraded hardware I hope they plan to release that functionality soon

dwaite2• 2 years ago

It is highly unlikely that iPads or AVP will ever natively run Mac apps. At best, you would be able to run MacOS as a VM with some clever maintenance/windowing/storage tweaks.

eddieroger• 2 years ago

I do, too, and agree with what you're saying. This device is great if you can afford to drop the cash on it and have use cases for which it excels. I would love it to run Mac apps, but am just as happy projecting my Mac to it. Content consumption is great on it, and I really enjoy working with it on. If only my coworkers didn't find my ghostly Persona do off-putting during Zoom calls.

snapcaster8• 2 years ago

I do use projecting the mac, but it's not a great experience overall. Like it doesn't utilize any of the AVP interaction paradigms and if I want to use a keyboard I have to decide to hook it up to my mac or my AVP

layer8• 2 years ago

Apple wants you to buy both (as with the iPad), and maybe more importantly wants the OS of new device categories to be much less open (more controllable) than macOS is. So that’s very unlikely.

snapcaster8• 2 years ago

I mean, i'm all in on apple and have all that stuff. Would be fine if it's up offloading compute to a mac or something like that and make the integration more seamless

haunter• 2 years ago

until it can run MacOS apps I can't really replace my laptop

I remember the same comments when the iPad came out 14 years ago

Hint: never gonna happen

snapcaster8• 2 years ago

I was one of the people saying that haha, a man can dream right?

proee• 2 years ago

Is there a market for a "simple" Google Glasses type product, to show alerts and overlays in a regular set of glasses?

For productivity, I could see replacing my Apple watch with a pair of Apple Glasses. Useful for alerts and basic data such as exercise stats and GPS overlays, etc.

Add a few buttons to the side of the glasses for core functions.

Is there no market for such a product, or is the tech for this still to primitive?

infotainment2• 2 years ago

I think the problem is, all those things you just described (alerts, etc), are Good Enough™ on a smartwatch.

Could you put them in smart glasses too? Sure, but the display tech just isn’t there yet to make it nonintrusive.

BoorishBears• 2 years ago

It sounds like you want Oppo Air Glass if it ever releases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5KPfCzqqhQ

LASR• 2 years ago

Multi-monitor support might have made this worthwhile for professional / prosumer users.

But you can only have a single display in VR. My single oldschool physical display works way better. So this limitation makes it an expensive curiosity than a useful tool.

fullwaza• 2 years ago

There is an app called split screen that solves this. I'm able to bring in my MBP and a second screen. It works really well actually.

Terretta4• 2 years ago

you can only have a single display in VR

That's not a hardware limitation.

See https://immersed.com

In AVP I tend to run three displays equivalent to MacBook screen, but five is fine too in a kind of + shape.

powera• 2 years ago

I own an AppleVision (and am mostly happy with it), but this is not surprising. The current system isn't worth $3500 to consumers.

It is priced at about twice what people will expect, has very limited apps, and very limited "immersive media". Some of that will get better over the next year ... but a promise of "better next year" won't move units today.

ado__dev3• 2 years ago

The lack of a killer app suite alongside the $4k price-point is what kept me at bay.

bugbuddy2• 2 years ago

It’s $3500.

ado__dev3• 2 years ago

+ tax + a case for it puts it at over $4k.

duped• 2 years ago

But how will I watch a movie or game with my friends if none of them have AVP?

causal2• 2 years ago

I feel like we're reaching an inflection point where tech-companies are about to discover whether humans are willing to live in an all-digital world, or if they would rather just continue physical reality with digital-enhancements.

Tech companies keep pushing towards all-digital because they carry a lot more power in a world of their own making. They keep trying to get away from solving real-world pain points (e.g. being able to talked to loved ones) to solving for manufactured pain points (e.g. dopamine addiction to short-form content).

tim3332• 2 years ago

Or which they prefer. The iPhone device like set up seems the most popular really. It wouldn't surprise me if it still is a century hence.

vjulian• 2 years ago

Smartphones (still) offer novelty, and there are no alternatives to some of their useful functions, hence popularity. I’ll be livid if smartphone-type devices are popular a century from now.

lostmsu• 2 years ago

It is also possible that their headset just sucks.

causal2• 2 years ago

Yes. Someday augmented reality glasses will be possible in the form-factor of regular glasses, and I see no reason that would be unpopular.

paxys• 2 years ago

Not surprising considering a $500 Quest 3 gets you most of the way there and has a much better (and much more open) ecosystem.

Terretta4• 2 years ago

This widely held opinion generally doesn't survive a couple days of non-gaming use.

benmo_atx• 2 years ago

VR doesn't survive a couple days of non-gaming use.

vrighter• 2 years ago

and the key takeaway of the article is that neither do they with an avp.

Gigachad• 2 years ago

Yeah, except gaming and porn is the only thing people care about in VR. And Apple doesn’t do either.

jimmySixDOF• 2 years ago

and here comes Google/Samsung with their big XR announcement getting back into hardware/software this year.

wombat-man• 2 years ago

I was hyped to buy one until I tried the demo. Just needs to be a bit lighter. Being cheaper couldn't hurt either.

kernal• 2 years ago

The hubris of Apple to think people would buy such an overpriced and underwhelming headset. They should have developed a mid priced VR headset.

SirMaster• 2 years ago

Who would have thought people don't want this big thing on over their face for long periods?

musicale• 2 years ago

Demand for 400K Vision Pro devices at $3500 each greatly exceeds my expectations.

Apple cuts Vision Pro shipments as demand falls 'sharply beyond expectations'

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