Vision Pro is a new milestone in mixed reality, but it's not the next iPhone
Apple unveiled the long-awaited “mixed reality” headset on Monday. The gadget, called Vision Pro, will go on sale “early next year.” It combines virtual reality with augmented reality, which covers digital images on top of the real world.
Apple says it sells for $3,499, which is even higher than most analysts' expectations, nearly 12 times that of the biggest selling VR headset Meta's Quest 2.
Apple's stock price reached a record high before the announcement. Following the announcement of this headset, the stock price closed down 0.8% to $179.58. How many people would actually buy this $3,499 device?
After interest broke out during the pandemic, headphone sales plummeted in the first quarter of this year, and the overall AR/VR headset market fell 54.4% year over year.
Compared to the same period last year, revenue from Meta's Reality Labs division, which includes headphone sales, fell 50% in the most recent quarter.
This left Meta far behind the trajectory that had been conceived for the unit. A Meta executive predicted in 2018 that the company's metaverse would reach 100 million hardware units within ten years, half of which would be Meta devices.
“There will be a slowdown between now and the end of this year,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager tracking the virtual reality market at IDC. “Until now, virtual reality has been largely built around games. I think gaming will still be the dominant use case even in the future.”
In March of this year, Meta cut the prices of most existing Quest headphones after raising the price of the entry-level Quest 2 128GB version in July 2022, hoping to stimulate demand.
Its high-end Meta Quest Pro now retails at around $1,000, below the launch price of $1,500, and the 256 GB version of Quest 2 now starts at around $430, below $500.
According to estimates by market research firm IDC, Meta's Quest 2 and Quest Pro devices accounted for nearly 80% of the 8.8 million virtual reality headsets sold in 2022.
The Chinese-owned ByteDance Pico device lags far behind second place with a 10% market share, and the company also has social media rival Douyin.
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