It looks like things aren’t going so well for Apple in the VR/AR department. When the company announced its Vision Pro headset, it was met with a lot of mixed reactions mostly due to the incredibly high price point (and somewhat thanks to its creepy eye pass-through feature). It was a somewhat formidable headset, but there are just too many options out there that are more affordable.
With a price point of $3,500, it kind of limited the company to a very small niche of buyers. Mostly alienating the normal consumer, keeping those sales flooding toward companies like Meta (Quest series), Valve (Valve Index), Sony (PSVR2), and others.
Now the lackluster sales performance seems to have caught up with Apple as it has halted production of the headsets due to an excess amount of unsold inventory. The company now believes it has enough stock to last through the end of the year or even to the end of its lifecycle. Thus it is already either looking ahead toward the development of the next-generation model that may (hopefully) be more successful, or toward moving those resources to something completely different.
Apple could very well drop its efforts on a second-gen model if it feels that the total predicted profits aren’t reasonable enough to push forward. The company is known for scrapping ideas and moving on, sometimes before those ideas even become a reality.
It had predicted that over 400,000 units would be sold by the end of 2024. Leaving numbers far below the original estimate that Apple was shooting for. Meanwhile, Meta appears to have sold close to or more than one million Meta Quest units in 2024. It is likely that Sony met the same number or more for the year (some predicting that it might have crept closer to two million, but these numbers have never been confirmed).
Honestly, once again leaning on the price tag more than anything, none of this comes as a surprise. The numbers the company was originally hoping for (to sell around one million in 2024) were simply unreasonable. The features and capabilities of the headset were commendable, but it just didn’t balance with the overall costs. Consumers (clearly) have more important things to spend their money on. It would be wise for Apple to attempt a sub-$1,000 model(s) if it wants to steal any business away from the other companies.
For now, nothing official has been announced but the company, so it will be hard to say if and when a new headset will become a reality. It likely won’t even announce anything until later in the year (if so), or else such news will only take additional sales momentum away from whatever stock it has piled up. So you might not see anything new until 2026 if sales continue to remain low (if at all).
