- 20% chance they continue to iterate on the Vision Pro or its successors for the next 5+ years
- 40% chance they release one more non-pro model that’s maybe half the cost and nobody buys it
- 40% chance it’s already dead and the Vision Pro is all we see of that whole product line.
If I were CEO I would definitely kill it now and lay off everyone involved. It was an experiment and it didn’t work out. Nobody wants or needs VR. Hardly anyone even remembers that it exists.
> If I were CEO I would definitely kill it now and lay off everyone involved. It was an experiment and it didn’t work out. Nobody wants or needs VR. Hardly anyone even remembers that it exists.
I have no idea if AR/VR will ever really be a thing, but this is hardly the first time Apple has launched a product that struggled with fit initially. It's also the first time they've launched so expensive of a consumer "gadget" as the initial foray into a market as a core product - the original iPhone was "only" $900ish in today-dollars, so the vision pro is nearly 4x in price, and apple slashed the price to $600ish in today-dollars shortly after launch. (Obviously they've had expensive computers, but the pricing wasn't out of the norm for the industry)
The original iPhone also totally flopped outside of the US. Total worldwide sales a year in were about 4 million, almost entirely all in the US. That's quite a bit better than the AVP, but, phones are also quite a bit more ubiquitous than the AVP. Smartphones were also already much more mainstream of a concept at the time the iPhone launched - you already had half a decade of Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm, etc. devices out there. VR stuff has existed too, but it's remained much more niche.
The Watch and HomePod's initial versions had slow starts. The watch is obviously a big deal to them now, and the homepod has done OK with the mini.
Sometimes it takes 2-3 generations to figure out a product fit. If Apple cut products every time the first generation product didn't meet expectations, we'd certainly have fewer Apple products.
I think it depends on whether they can find a useful mass market niche for it. The original Apple Watch was envisioned as a multipurpose wrist computer phone but after a few years turned out to be more marketable as a fitness tracker with pretty watch faces and available bonus features that aren’t widely used.
They’ve now discovered that $3500 device for a solitary person to watch 3D Disney movies isn’t it.
But personally I would bet they give it a runway to try and figure out how to make VR happen.
It came up in passing when they said that the base iPhone 16 would be able to take 3D images. When they showed someone viewing the images, they were using a Vision Pro.
- 20% chance they continue to iterate on the Vision Pro or its successors for the next 5+ years
- 40% chance they release one more non-pro model that’s maybe half the cost and nobody buys it
- 40% chance it’s already dead and the Vision Pro is all we see of that whole product line.
If I were CEO I would definitely kill it now and lay off everyone involved. It was an experiment and it didn’t work out. Nobody wants or needs VR. Hardly anyone even remembers that it exists.