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Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans

ft.com

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Re: Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans

#8
From the beginning, this product was a very classically Apple strategy of 'let's just take the Next Gen technology, integrate it well, and beat everyone else to market.'

Similar to the iPhone 'winning' capacitive touch (or the iPod winning with Toshiba's mini HDD's), Apple plans to 'win' on SOTA hand tracking, camera-based full-color passthrough, face tracking, etc.

These are all things that Meta (and the rest) have talked about, but have not yet executed on.

It's not surprising (given this strategy) that the first runs are at low yield, the $3tn question will be can Tim Cook fix the problem fast enough (he was largely chosen as CEO because of this exact skill).

My guess is that this follows a 1/2 scale iPad trajectory - People like it, the early days are choppy but no one denigrates the product's quality, the product defines the category (and potentially becomes the category like iPad did), then over time the category becomes a utility product (e.g., iPad cash registers driving a lot of sales) rather than a 'new' iPhone.

Re: Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans

#10
post #5

Even if they only build 100,000 units, it should be enough to build hype and get developers onboard for their more affordable mass market 2nd gen device coming in 2025. For context, Oculus sold only 56,334 of their DK1 devkits.

Oculus were nobodies more or less back then and didn't have apple's supply chain expertise, and even still their devkits were only like $300 USD 10 years ago.

I feel like the major cuts are because of lack of hype. I don't think anybody understands if there is a market for this, so nobody is sure how much money to put into developing for it.

To me this feels like the first apple product in a long time without a compelling use case and no solid idea of who the potential customer is.

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