Apple Vision Pro U.S. Sales Are All but Dead, Market Analysts Say

I wonder whether the behavior Apple has exhibited around their developer relations (especially their EU / notorization related troubles) has had a chilling effect on people's willingness to support a new platform like this. Without the raw number of users that something like the iPhone has, does Apple make it worthwhile to create apps / games for their platforms? I'm not a developer, so maybe there is a more technical reason for this, but from the outside it seems as though both indie developers and large tech companies (like Google not making a YouTube app, and Netflix) are reluctant to support VisionOS.

Or, maybe it isn't Apple-specific; maybe there simply isn't enough users, or VR/AR as a software paradigm is currently too far removed from how companies design their applications, and it is just a matter of time until they adapt. Like I said, I am not a developer, so maybe I'm missing something obvious here.

"...analysts have noted that many who bought one were confused by its more complicated setup and what they were supposed to use it for in their daily lives."

There's the root of the problem right there. Apple's best successes had a very clear purpose in mind from the beginning:

- iPod: 1,000 songs in your pocket

- iPhone: A phone, an internet communicator, an iPod

- iPad: Media consumption

AVP didn't have a clear purpose right out the door, and it's very un-Apple to launch a new product category without figuring that out first.

Sounds like the consumer tech version of "$70k EVs aren't selling anymore!"

It was extremely pricey and saturated the market, and from what I read most of the market was underwhelmed by its capabilities. I'm still waiting on my virtual workstation where I can have infinite virtual monitor space, instead we keep getting various whiz-bang gimmicks that are good for a demo but have no real use.

While I think this was largely expected from everyone following AVP, it will be very interesting to see how Apple attempts to salvage this project.

They’ve really backed themselves in to a corner with the pricing of their headset far exceeding what all but the most enamored enthusiasts are willing to stomach. On top of that, the sales are so bad that it is not worth companies of nearly any size to dedicate time to creating apps or content for the platform.

Apple is probably going to have to light a gigantic stack of cash on fire to try to course correct this. Or they’ll cut their losses and write it off entirely

I think about buying a Vision Pro from time to time, but Apple’s lackluster support for gaming keeps me from it. I spend a fair bit of my free time sim racing, and I think the Vision Pro would be amazing for it. But! I really don’t want to spend $3K for an unsupported experience.

Apple needs to accept that even a “pro” product needs be usable for non “pro” tasks, and needs to support them. If their Vision line is going to be successful they’re going to need to have more first party support of things like gaming. Partner with Steam, and/or Sony, to get more titles on it. Or pay developers to port games to it and ensure the experience is stellar. It won’t be a short term strategy, but I think a lack of good and unique applications will create a chicken and egg problem. No one wants one, because there are no killer apps, and no one is making those killer apps, because there isn’t a large enough audience.

I personally like Sony’s PSVR2, a dumb headset, but has good fidelity. I hope Apples next cheaper VR headset has the same visual quality but less of an OS.

The thing costs a bazillion dollars, what did they expect… people to suddenly wear this for day to day tasks?

I said it on the day they first announced it, as soon as the media hype was over, no one would ever mention it again.

Other than price, not sure what else they could do to make it appealing.

I think VR is a symptom that we're both running out of fertile tech to mine, and the population at large is tired of it.

In order to make a compelling experience the tech is Very Expensive...and what it really is is a funky monitor and funky mouse.

Well monitors are a couple hundred bucks and a mouse is $50.

And even when it _is_ affordable, it's just not 'sticky' (yes, I know, poor choice of words)

I've used 'em since the Vive and some of the experiences are outstanding....and yet they end up collecting dust for weeks at a time. I use it, it's great, I enjoy it...and then it goes back to collecting dust.

And I'm pretty sure the cheap, sunglasses, 4x better display of the future would be the same.

Might have been exactly the plan. Soak up all the sucker enthusiast money with the expensive model while establishing vision OS as "premium", then bring that "premium" product to the masses by coming out with something much cheaper later for the main market.

Leaks of Apple's attempts to create a cheaper consumer version of this tech in an eyeglasses form factor go back to around the time of ARKit's release in 2017.

Every time they restart the effort, they eventuslly come to the conclusion that the tech just isn't there yet.

Currently, the short term plan (now that developers have something they can work with) is to produce a lighter/cheaper version of the shipping headset, while they continue long term work on an eyeglasses form factor for the consumer market.

Did Vision Pro inherit limitations from iPadOS?

I enjoyed demoing my friend's Vision Pro but I regularly found myself displeased with the gesture controls. Once the novelty of interacting with the demo features wore off, I found myself thinking that the device was best suited as a monitor replacement. To that end, I would absolutely need to use a mouse and keyboard.

I also wonder if Apple's decision to eschew any special pointing or peripheral device in favor of hand tracking was the best idea. If I owned one of these things and used it for casual internet browsing, I would much prefer some little handheld accessory so I could press buttons without having to gesticulate and make sure my posture was correct so that the cameras could pick up my hand movements.

No one wants this. It’s a gimmick. Google glass was 2013.

Trick my brain into believing it is in another world. That is what is exciting. This is what your consumers want. An escape from this world into another. Sometimes it’s there, most of the time it’s not.

I was in an Apple Store the other day for something unrelated. While waiting, I asked one of the employees if I should try the AVP. Their response was "it's cool I guess. Probably not worth the effort." Pretty telling.

<humerous-speculating> What if Zuck made the Meta Quest Pro as a psy-op to get Apple to make a pro headset and waste resources, simply to get back at them for clamping down on user tracking? </humerous-speculating>

Let's say you are committed to AR/VR research. It's expensive. Let's say your research has generated tech that can be built into $2500 headset. You still have a long road to get better tech into a lower price range.

Then somebody proposes that you sell 100,000 of what you have right now for $3500. This provides $100 million dollars of profit to offset your research costs. In the end, you manufacture 80,000 and sell 60,000 of them. So you net $10 million plus 60,000 free testers (well, 1000 after everyone stops using them at all) plus 20,000 surplus units to use in various research.

Gizmodo can paint this as a commercial failure. Apple could sell the 20,000 unsold units for $100 each. That would generate another $2 million of profit even at a $2400 marginal loss per unit. They would fly off the shelves and Gizmodo would paint this as a huge commercial success. Even though Apple still wouldn't hit their 100,000 unit target. It would create panic in Apple's competitors even though they actually make a profit on $500 headsets.

So read this however you want. It's a commercial failure because it only netted $10 million dollars and might only net $1 million/year going forward. Or it's a successful funding round on the road to cheaper and more capable future products.

I'm not particularly an Apple fan, but I think it's silly to portray this in such a bad light. Would somebody like SimulaVR love to experience such a "failure"?

(All numbers above except the 100,000 target units and the $3500 price are hypothetical.)

My feeling is, if most of Apple's employees are almost all not using the thing then it's a failure. I suspect 98% of all Apple employees use a iPhone, a Mac, and probably an iPad, and an Apple TV. I bet < 2% use a Vision Pro. If their own employees don't use it, why would anyone else?

To take that further, one dream of AR (and maybe VR too) is it's supposed to make you more productive. Maybe it's having 2, 3, 6 screens instead of one. Maybe it's 3d manipulation instead of mouse, touch. Maybe it's 2 hands instead of a finger. Maybe it's no computer needed because virtual displays.

If a device actually made you more productive then Apple would buy every employee that device. It would be stupid not too. Clearly the Vision Pro is not that device.

I'm pretty confident Meta has the same issue. They pushed using Quest for meetings, for productivity, and now their new commercials are pushing it for better instruction. But, I'm pretty confident, none of their employees use it for those purposes and if they don't, why would anyone else?

The Quest at least as a bunch of games, some of which are worth the experience I know several of their employees that play those games so that's the one thing they are actually using the device for themselves.

Anyone that has been following VR/AR headsets for the last 30 years was already expecting this.

How come does Apple come to a market that was already going down, pretending that Quest and HoloLens never did developer sessions showing exactly the same kind of content, a decade ago?

To make matters worse, their current attitude that developers should feel grateful and blessed to even be able to touch their SDKs, means that very few feel like targeting a device that costs as much as it does.

I fancy myself a "VR for productivity" enthusiast. I own a PCVR setup, an Areo by Varjo[1]. And I do not use it. My cost out the door was higher than the cost of the Vision Pro and I learned some very painful lessons:

1) For VR productivity, I need my desktop application windows to run native in a VR 3d window manager. So far, all I've found are variations on the following: you get to remote into your existing desktop window manager which is projected as a 2d plane into your 3d space. This is practically useless. To actually use VR for productivity... I need to have my task windows not be co-planer.

2) Last time I checked up on this, practically no one [2] is working on this, I have stopped even watching the VR space. The hardware is here, but no one is making the software I want.

3) Vision Pro (as I understand it) is not a productivity VR headset. It's an ipad on your face that can remote into your desktop - but not in a way that integrates into the 3d window manager.

[1]: https://varjo.com/products/aero/

[2]: Okay, techincally SimulaVR is working on a native 3d window manager, but they opened preorders years ago and still don't have a ship date.

I remember having conversations here on HN about how the launch of this device would change everything in the field, because only Apple knows the magic sauce, and they always win, or something along those lines.

Well, I think they confused Apple with Steve Jobs, yes Jobs had almost a Midas touch regarding product design, especially when given the time to reflect on competition mistakes, and people forget that he also "missed the mark" a few times.

Tim Cook is a different character, his special ability is his uncanny focus on squeezing the supply chain and keeping the money printer churning.

This is not the Jesus goggle the fanboys were looking for, even if the tech seems impressive, I think they should not have launched it.

I can remember the virtual IO headset from 25 years ago, great for playing games and for watching TV whilst doing the washing up in the kitchen - or so the marketing men said.

This last application amused me because nobody does washing up, they just use dishwashing machines or eat disposable junk food, plus the family unit has been atomised.

I spoke enthusiastically about these headsets to a friend and his conclusion was that people just would not want these things on their faces. People go out to be seen as well as to see.

In recent years we have had people scorn the failed IO Goggles for the latency, low resolution and price, to claim that Meta and others have fixed these problems. They might have done, but they haven't conquered games or transport. You would think kids would be wearing these things on long car journeys and grown ups using them on plane flights.

Nothing has changed significantly for the mass market and these Apple VR headsets are clunkier than what we had 25 years ago, I am sorry to say. They are more expensive too.

If they were an open platform, a glorified monitor, they would have a niche with VR applications, such as when you want to present a 3D model to someone, for example, a building or a car, where the ability to have a proper walkaround has some advantage in impressing the client.

Civilians, whom this product is aimed at, do not and will never have the hard to learn 3D content creating skills. Nobody is going to remodel their kitchen with these gadgets.

Really it is for gaming where this product should win.

The elephant in the room is glasses, anyone with the money for this gadget wears glasses and they don't really mix.

The super-expensive Tesla Model S and X barely sold until the cheaper Model 3 took off. Given that the people who have bought the Vision Pro consider this device revolutionary, this is probably headed on the same trajectory.

I would have gotten one if the DPI for text was as good as a monitor and I didn't need to depend on a MacBook. (I don't watch videos, but I'd love a monitor-less solution for coding on the plane.)

The hubris of Apple thinking people would buy a $3500 USD VR/AR headset.

I don't think the price is the problem. People spend a lot on hobbies (it amazes me how many people ride 5000-10000€ road bikes). It's obviously too expensive that everyone buys one, but there are still lots of people who could afford it.

The bigger problem is that I just see absolutely no reason to buy it.

Damn, i was hoping at least the hype would last long enough for google to release their apps on it

Personally, such a product is a non-starter if it faces the same restrictions that an iPad does.

If I’m spending “pro computer” money, I want the pro computer. Having no way to access the file system or run code is just crazy to me.

An Apple 15" Macbook Air runs $1300. An Apple 27" Studio Display with stand runs $2000.

I'm amused that Apple fans are not willing to spend $3500 for a computer with a 3000+" display that you don't have to hold on your lap or desk.

What would they pay for a 15" Macbook Air with two fold-out screens?

I can't help but feel that somebody is going to get things just right and disrupt computing as we've known it. Even if it takes several "failed" experiments like Glass or AVP to find the sweet spot.

Makes sense. The only VR market up till now has been the gaming market, and the AVP is a locked down device that's incompatible with the preeminent gaming platform. This is probably why Apple has marketed it as an AR device, but although AVP is a nice step forward towards that vision, AR experiences will have a gigantic technology gap for the foreseeable future due to battery life issue. That's all without considering the show-stopping price for AVP.

It’s important to note that predicted numbers for the whole year are limited to <450k units because they are limited by display manufacturing.

The report says they will sell under 500K units in the year, which matches that.

It also says they’ve sold around 100K units within this most recent quarter . Which if you divide by the number of months since its launch, is also completely inline with the linear projection of the number of units that could have been manufactured for that period.

It's heavy and the extra encumbrance is not great for general purpose computing, though I never felt the need for extra screen real estate while I'm coding, watching youtube, sending emails etc.

That said I still use my AVP regularly, it's a great home theater system for 4k HDR content that's portable for travel. I've owned other headsets like the valve index but the novelty of 3d gaming wore off pretty quickly.

I don't think much people are interested to wear some heavy stuff that makes them look stupid, regardless of how practical or not the computing experience is.

It is as simple as that. When the capabilities of a Vision Pro will be available directly from an invisible chip implanted in your head, yes it will be a success. Not as long as you'll have to wear goofy headsets.

I'm interested, but am waiting for v2 or v3. At this point it's already been out for 6 months, so what's another 6 months in hopes of a smaller/lighter version with a slightly lower price point, not to mention more apps and content. Reviews haven't been strong enough to make me think I'm missing out on much with the v1.

no developer wants to waste their time developing apps for a product that nobody other than the .001% will ever use

> The true test for Apple’s spatial dreams may rest on the rumored (slightly) cheaper headset.

They're gonna have to do a lot better than "slightly" there. At least to make it a success in more than just the US.

To be fair to Apple, seems Sony is also struggling to shift their VR googles for the PS5. Maybe the mass market novelty of VR is ramping down or is the Meta Quest 3 still selling well?

Disney should buy them up at a discount and set up some AR "shows" in their parks to handle crowd capacity while during the ongoing renovations in Orlando and Anaheim.

I wanted to buy but it requires custom fitted lenses for glasses wearers, and Apple doesn't support my prescription.

The best part about product launches like this one is that it helps me know whose opinions to ignore.

The hype on VR dying so fast does not bode well for gen AI. Unfortunately, C-suite brass will continue to insist that everyone, deep down, wants it. If they don't think they want it, it's only because they haven't had it shoved in their face nearly enough.

It’s kinda interesting seeing Google try and fail to find the next revenue source after search ads, and now seeing Apple try and fail to diversify away from iPhone sales. They are both wildly successful, but I’m ready for a new crop of competitors in the market.

This is really not a shock. If you wanted one, you bought one already. But the number of people who wanted one is fairly minimal: Super early adopters, those with more money than sense, and developers.

It's too expensive for the every-person to buy, too early for even most early adopters, has very little practical uses so far. And those who know, know this device is effectively a devkit in retail clothing.

The first iPhone sucked. The first Apple watch wasn't great (and quickly lost support). The first iPod was probably one of the better "firsts" because it was better than what was out there, same with the iPad. But it generally takes even Apple a couple generations before their products really get going. Just wait till the AVP2 or 3.

I've been on the verge of buying it for a while, because I normally work from my laptop and can't be bothered to sit at a desk with a big clunky monitor.

OS 1 had disappointing mac mirroring, only slightly bigger resolution than my laptop.

But later OS versions talking about large-resolution or panoramic mac mirroring... that's super compelling for my use case. The productivity benefits of larger or multiple monitors, without having to sit at a desk.

I’ve said it before on this forum: Tim Cook needs to go for this.

> Sales expectations will put even more pressure on Apple engineers to design something that can compete with devices like the $500 Meta Quest 3 while justifying the higher price tag.

... and it's not like the oculus thingies have sold in the billions. VR still has no killer app.