Apple Scales Back Vision Pro Manufacturing (But Not For the Reasons You May Think)
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A new report from The Information reveals that Apple has “sharply scaled back production” of the Vision Pro and may stop making the device entirely in the next three months. While that may sound like news that bodes ill for Apple’s mixed-reality headset, it’s likely something Apple was planning for all along.
The news comes from multiple sources “directly involved in building components for the device,” which sounds like folks in Apple’s supply chain rather than anyone within Apple itself. However, The Information notes that the move suggests that Apple simply has enough inventory in stock to meet projected demand and has no desire to churn out more headsets that it will likely never sell.
From its inception, Apple’s $3,500 headset was never intended to be a mover and shaker in sales. Over two years before Apple even showed it off, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said it wasn’t being developed for the masses and said that his sources within Apple were only projecting sales of about one headset per day in each of its retail stores — a figure that would work out to 180,000 units in the first year.
Shortly after the Vision Pro was unveiled at Apple’s 2023 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), some analysts believed Apple was preparing as many as 800,000 units to sell in 2024. It’s unclear how serious Apple was about that estimate, but it cut that in half to 400,000 units at some point; the Financial Times reported a month after the headset debuted that Apple was aiming for only 400,000 units, scaled back from its ambitions of one million. On the other hand, Ming-Chi Kuo maintained Apple only reduced the number in April when it cancelled its plans for a second-generation model in 2025.
In July, Bloomberg shared an IDC report revealing that the Vision Pro had failed to sell even 100,000 units in a single quarter since its launch, with 92,000 units sold in February and March and another 80,000 in the second April–June quarter of this year.
Still, Apple’s reported goal of selling 400,000 headsets wasn’t just about the United States. The headset went on sale in China, Japan, and Singapore in mid-June, selling 7,200 units in those last two weeks. While Sales in the US reportedly plummeted in Q3, the global launch has picked up the slack, with a July launch in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the UK. Most analysts predict that those additional five countries will generate another 200,000 sales by the end of the year, easily reaching Apple’s 2024 target of 400,000 units.
Most analysts agree that the sales of the Vision Pro will fall off sharply in early 2025, and there’s every reason to believe that’s exactly what Apple expects. So far, most sources indicate that sales have been in line with projections, so it’s reasonable that Apple knows exactly how many Vision Pro headsets it needs to carry it through until it launches the next version.
Apple is said to be working on a lower-cost version of the headset — a “Vision” to the Vision Pro — that will sell for around $2,000. If all goes according to plan, that will be released in late 2025, after which a second-generation version of the Vision Pro will land with a very similar design but a more powerful chip and hopefully some lighter-weight components.
It’s been so long since Apple released a new category-defining product that it’s easy to forget that the original iPhone and Apple Watch didn’t fare much better than the Vision Pro. Many pundits laughed at the iPhone in 2007, predicting it would never get any meaningful market share. The $500 first-generation model was expensive at a time when most phones were available for free on carrier-subsidized plans, and it was extremely limited even by the standards of that day. However, from that humble beginning, Apple built it into the meteoric success we know today.
Apple’s vision for spatial computing may not pan out the same way its ambitions for mobile computing did — AR/VR headsets are an area that most people haven’t embraced the same way as mobile phones and portable music players — but there’s no doubt the Vision Pro is an early-adopter product that’s intended to define the category rather than become a massive hit on its own. It’s what Apple will do with this product lineup over the long term that will prove whether its idea of spatial computing has the traction to usher us into a new era of technology or if it’s a solution to a problem nobody has.
