Three months after the Vision Pro mixed reality headset went on sale, Apple’s first new hardware device in years could already be facing headwinds.
Ming-Chi Kuo, a Apple An analyst with ties to its Asian supply chain wrote on Tuesday that its channel checks with component makers showed the tech giant is sharply trimming its expectations and now expects to sell between 400,000 and 450,000 units this year.
“Demand in the U.S. market has fallen significantly more than expected,” he said Posted To Mediumwith the market consensus being between 700,000 and 800,000.
Since Apple has not released a forecast for Vision Pro sales and has not responded to one Assets When you ask for a comment, it’s difficult to verify his claims.
However, the viral excitement surrounding Vision Pro’s launch in early February and its claim to usher in a “new era of spatial computing” has died down considerably.
I tried Vision Pro for the first time: damn, this display is amazing and the eye tracking is like magic, it feels very forward thinking and it’s a bit heavy too
Second time: The immersion factor is still as high. With special videos it’s hit or miss, you have to keep the right distance. And wow, that… https://t.co/iqSvs1e8LD
— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) January 16, 2024
Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s best-known startup accelerator, shared his frustration with using Vision Pro while working on Wednesday.
“Do the people at Apple even list this as dog food?” Er wrotewhere a technology industry term is used for developers testing their own products.
When Apple loses a technology expert like Tan, “things don’t go well,” in his words.
The XR space is struggling to find mainstream traction
The field of augmented reality (XR), an umbrella term that encompasses all forms of technology including MR and VR, has struggled to carve out a niche outside of the very early adopters.
The gain headsets on offer weren’t enough for mainstream buyers to justify the high upfront cost of purchasing a headset Sony PlayStation VR or Meta Quest.
While interest was low, third-party developers were often reluctant to invest the additional resources into developing ported applications and software, let alone customized applications that would take full advantage of the hardware’s capabilities.
And unless there was compelling content that they couldn’t find elsewhere, consumers had little reason to care.
Demand for the Quest, which used to be sold under the Oculus brand, was very low compared to its $45 billion a year accumulated metaverse losses that Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has decided to license its operating software to other headset manufacturers in order to drive the growth of the entire XR ecosystem.
It was hoped that Apple, with its instant brand recognition and enormous market influence, would end the chicken-and-egg dilemma that has long hampered the industry.
That’s crazy:
New Vision Pro app releases have plummeted…When it comes to XR apps and hardware, we always talk about the “chicken or egg” problem…
…it doesn’t appear that the AVP v1 (aka Dev Kit) has jump-started the XR app ecosystem as much as we would have hoped pic.twitter.com/4JpHE56aEz
— Troy Kirwin (@tkexpress11) April 17, 2024
However, the device was criticized for being excessively expensive and inconvenient –Youtube Reviewer Marques Brownlee emphasized three times how hard it was.
In a worrying sign that Apple has so far failed to convince people that developing tools for their headset is worth it, data shows that the frequency of new releases for Vision Pro apps is also steadily decreasing .
“The challenge for Vision Pro is to address the lack of key applications, pricing and headset convenience without sacrificing the transparent user experience,” warned Apple analyst Kuo.
However, there was some positive news.
Although Meta on Wednesday forecast that annual operating losses in its Reality Labs segment would rise “sensible“As the company continues to invest, the division’s revenue increased by nearly a third year-over-year, driven by sales of Quest headsets.”