Apple is cutting down their shipments of their Apple Vision Pro headsets.
As reported by Insider Gaming, analyst Ming Chi-Kuo reported that Apple reduced headset shipments from 800,000 to 450,000 units. Ming Chi-kuo also reported in his Medium blog that Apple made this decision before launching the headset outside the US.
Ming Chi-Kuo believes that Apple had plans to make a 2025 version of the Apple Vision Pro, but that has also been cancelled, as the company now expects the market for VR to shrink next year.
Apple Vision Pro only launched earlier this year. While Apple pitched it as a new age of ‘spatial computing’, it was also primed as a gaming device, better than any prior device modern Apple has made. The headset came bundled with 200 games from Apple Arcade, which sounds like a generous deal until you learn that Apple was selling it at a steep $ 3500.
That puts Apple’s headset in a much higher category than other VR headsets, but Apple did pitch the Vision Pro as a somewhat different device. It’s a mixed reality device, combining elements from VR and AR. While the headset is heavy, it can be fitted with a battery and used while mobile. It’s also outfitted with cameras so you can still see in front of you, and really, get a 360 view of the world.
Non-gaming applications of the Vision Pro included taking 360 photos and video, using 360 perspective documents for productivity, etc. But the high cost was paired with incredible discomfort for many users, such that there were reports of high returns shortly after launch.
As for what this means for video games? It adds up to our own reporting on the gaming focused PlayStation VR 2, and other mixed reality tech. We reported on PSVR 2 rumors that stock was piling up, and then that sales were very poor, in March of last year. That led to a price cut in October of that same year.
And the lastest reports indicate that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has lost $ 3.85 billion in their own mixed reality business, Reality Labs. It’s been 12 years since Palmer Luckey launched a Kickstarter for Oculus, hereby jumpstarting the consumer VR revival of the last decade, but after all this time, the technology has failed to gain enough market traction to go mainstream and really become the tech behemoth the industry expected it to be.
While the entire video game and tech industry has been affected adversely by the difficult business environment of the past five years, VR and mixed reality in general, hasn’t really been anywhere close to its goal since Oculus started. We’ll see if VR has any future of any kind by the time the next console generation comes around.
