Apple Vision Pro Sales Slow To A Trickle Despite Months Of Gushing Tech Press Hype
from the another-hype-cycle-come-and-gone dept
When the Apple Vision Pro launched back in February, the press had a sustained, two-month straight orgasm over the product’s potential to transform VR and the world of spatial computing.
Downplayed were little sticking points like the lack of app support; the short battery life (despite a bulky external battery pack Steve Jobs would have never approved of); the need for expensive additional prescription lenses for glasses wearers (more complex issues like astigmatism weren’t supported); or the fact that VR makes about 40 to 70 percent of the target audience for these products want to puke.
Much like the Metaverse, the Apple Vision Pro roared into the tech press hype bubble like a freight train, then retreated like a bit of a simpering wimp. Reports are now that sales for the headsets are fairly pathetic:
“Some Apple stores are reportedly down to selling just a handful of Vision Pros in an entire week, according to Bloomberg. The hype around the Apple Vision Pro has fallen dramatically since the headset sold 180,000 units during its January pre-order weekend. Demand for demos of the technology is also reportedly “way down” since the product’s launch. Even worse, the report says, many people who book appointments to test Vision Pros simply don’t show up anymore.”
It was clear that this was basically a glorified prototype aimed at helping Apple figure out future iterations that people can actually afford and that can make it through an entire movie without having to charge the battery. But at the same time Apple wanted to present the impression that this was utterly transformative technology, available today that would transform the way you work and play.
This has all been fairly representative of a tech press that, over the years, has become more of an extension of tech company marketing departments than any sort of journalistic endeavor. The vast majority of the Vision Pro coverage implied this was a product that would be utterly revolutionary; yet as Bloomberg notes, even avid early adopters seem to have forgotten the headset exists:
“I had initially used the Vision Pro whenever I watched a movie or YouTube, or when I wanted a more immersive screen for my Mac at home. These days, with the initial buzz wearing off, it seems clear that the Vision Pro is too cumbersome to use on a daily basis. Going through the process of attaching the battery, booting it up and navigating the interface often doesn’t feel worth it. And a killer app hasn’t emerged that would compel me to pick it up. It’s far easier to just use my laptop as a laptop and watch video on either my computer or big-screen TV.”
So again you’ve got a tech press hype cycle that professed we were witnessing something revolutionary, only for the product to wind up being… not that. Lost in a lot of the tech coverage for the Vision Pro was the fact that people just generally don’t like having a giant sweaty piece of plastic strapped to their fucking face.
The first thing Vision Pro fans will say to justify a lack of public interest is that this wasn’t supposed to sell well. That it was a water-testing prototype designed to benefit future iterations. And maybe that’s true; maybe it isn’t. Maybe Apple (a company that’s shifted from Jobs-era risk taking innovation to quality-focused iteration) will be the company that nails the perfect VR experience.
But I think it’s equally possible they won’t be. That they’re supplanted by a hungrier, smaller, less risk-averse and younger company. In which case all early adopters will be left with is hype-filled memories and a very expensive relic.
I’m interested in VR. I still think it holds promise. I’ve owned numerous headsets. I’ve tinkered with most modern VR apps and gaming titles. And I still generally don’t think this tech truly becomes interesting until cords are eliminated, self-contained battery life becomes wholly irrelevant, weight is a non-factor, and the interfaces become seamlessly intuitive to the point of near-magic.
We’re still quite a way from all of that, no matter how much wish-casting the technology press tech industry marketing apparatus engage in.
Filed Under: AR, headset, tech press, virtual reality, vision pro, vr
Companies: apple
Comments on “Apple Vision Pro Sales Slow To A Trickle Despite Months Of Gushing Tech Press Hype”
Press reaction was more measured than that
I generally enjoy your takes, but this one is hyperbolic. Press reaction was way more measured and reasonable than you make it out. Nearly everything I read or watched on YouTube had the same reasonable reaction as your summary: it’s a prototype, they had to start somewhere, it’s a real compromise, etc.
Re: Continuation
And possibly you shouldn’t base an entire article off one rumor that gets fed to the press.
https://www.ped30.com/2024/04/25/apple-vision-kuo-cramer/#038;utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=apple-vision-kuo-cramer
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I don’t ever look for Apple stuff and all my iterations come from stuff in the tech news and sites like Techdirt. I was bombarded with emotional content exalting the thing for weeks when it came out and the article more or less describe my experience at the time. My thoughts at the time were that I hoped this gadget was actually as useful and as innovative as the coverage said it was. Not that I actually believed it would be, not before seeing it being adopted.
“Gushing tech press hype” seems to be a quite reasonable description.
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Couldn’t agree more! Maybe I missed something since I read about the headset in tech columns in general-interest media as opposed to tech-specific media, but everything I read was mixed. The impression I got from the reviews was, as you say, exactly the one that Karl gives, “that this was basically a glorified prototype aimed at helping Apple figure out future iterations.” I don’t remember reading anything that was even close to glowing.
I had this dream about six weeks ago.
I worked Apple Marketing IT for years. Apple 2110
50% of this was a dream. And once again, I was a droid. My boss, Andrew, said, grab your shit, we’re going to put down a rebellion. A rebellion, I asked, where? Well, not a rebellion but more of a civil war because there are two sides. You might think that we would do this virtually, but no, almost all executives at Apple do everything F2F. This is because the glasses have an absolute ton of apps that will wrap whoever you are talking to in whatever body you want them to be in. And they have no idea. So you could be talking to your boss trying to stifle your laughter and your bosses face is mapped onto a panda body. Or even worse, a Henti tentacle is trying to get in their mouth. Yeah, Apple gave up on PG around 2045.
Now, Apple corporate was still in a ship, but the ship was on the moon. Apple owned 1/24 of the surface of the moon. You know that treaty that said every country in the world had a piece of the moon? Well, when a company comes to you and says, Want to swap your national debt for your piece of the moon, it turns out 27 out of 200+ countries said, Hell yeah! So we are in the ship in the upper right of the Sea of Tranquility. Apple moved here in 2082. Just after the Google-Apple wars started. It only takes a couple of VP assassinations to get the picture. Google acquired its own South American country and remember its mission statement used to say, do no evil? Well now it’s more like, Yeah we do evil.
An aside (Microsoft did not feature in this dream; I don’t know why. If it was the Cascadia fault, earthquake, and the following Seattle tsunami, I don’t know, but they were MIA)
I was working in software on one of the dev teams. We stepped outside and put on our shoes because his office is a shoeless space. Andrew was an Executive Vice President, and I was just a Manage-droid in the division of the coders of FootOs. As we put on our Apple shoes, they booted up and gave us the ready-to-go beep. Yeah, Apple was the ultimate wearable company. They gave up on the driverless car and soon after went in another direction, creating the Apple glasses, Apple shoes, and the Steve shirts. For the shoes, like every other product, you can start with a basic 2-motor pair, and then you can upgrade the firmware and the number of motors. So you’re basically wearing these tiny Teslas wrapped around your feet. There are racing events using overclocked and overpowered ones, but most of us go with the standard 40 miles an hour four motor upgrade. Let me tell ya, on the moon’s gravity, it is hella fun. 40 miles an hour is dangerous, but these days, with your Apple helmet and the bodysuit, 40 miles an hour is pretty safe, besides, you can get a broken femur fixed overnight.
Not even looking back, Andrew said we’ll take the spin to the OS section. Now, the moon ship was a lot like the Cupertino building, but you could do things up here you couldn’t even dream of doing down on Earth, so “the spin” is a track on the upper side of the windows that goes all the way around the building and every 20° or so there a curved entrance and exit pathway. So you get up speed, you hit the curved entrance pathway, then like a bobsled, it takes you up to the track that is vertical on the windows, so you are honking around with centrifugal force holding you against the windows. With a kick-ass view at your feet. Yeah, it is full-on nerd rollerball. So we go about 60° around the spin and angle off on the Number six down spin exit. We decelerate to inter-office speed, then come up to the doors of the FootOS group. No more badging in because our glasses ID us to the doors. After the horrible experience, with the enormous headwear, Apple went away of embedded eyewear, but a couple of corneal explosions ended that experiment. Nowadays, it is all glasses, either in the Trek Jordi style or the full-on black Elon Musk style. The advantage of the Apple shoes is that they are the CPU for your glasses. Apple could never figure out how to get enough battery power or CPU cycles in something that anyone would wear on their head, so the shoes are the CPU, and they are encrypted tight beamed to your glasses. This way, you have more than enough power to do damn near anything. These days, the glasses are running at about 10,000 apps, and the shoes are about 150.
The doors swish open, and we walk into the main cubicle section, which has about 65 cubes. Like he said, it looked like a Civil War. About 60% of the group was on the left side, and the rest were on the right, and they were literally shouting at each other, cussing and swearing and saying things that I had no clue about. So Andrew walks up to the main wooden Apple table. It’s about 15 feet long, and 300 lbs. He takes hold of it and throws it end over end against the wall. No big deal. This IS the moon, remember? (I should fill you in on the current physicality of the upper Apple management. Most of them are serious body modders as are a lot of humans these days. So you have these guys that look like Big Steve(a really big guy in Apple IT support) if Steve looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Oh, I forgot to mention there are almost no clothes worn on the ship except for the occasional Apple helmet and high-speed bodysuit. Think skintight and tiny.)
So. The desk shut everybody up. He said, What the fuck is wrong with you guys, so, two of the leads came forward from each side, and it turns out that they were fighting about forking the OS into a left and right foot version. I could not believe it. Andrew said, Listen to me very carefully. There will be no forks. There will be no left and right OS. There will be one. One OS for the shoe. If I hear any more of this bullshit, that person will be leaving in a Google pod within an hour. The murmuring went silent. Now, I need to explain what a Google pod is. Anybody who was fired is put in a pod, and it is fired back at Earth, where presumably the person can be hired by Google. It is a single-person reentry vehicle that is very safe, and nobody has ever died. But trust me, you don’t want to leave the ship in a Google pod. Any family remaining behind is sent back in the standard fashion.
Andrew turned around and rolled out. I looked around and said, OK, everybody kiss and make up, get back to work. I don’t need to tell you that corporate will be deep-searching your emails looking for the words left foot and right foot, so you better have the context correct. There was some mumbling as one of the more impressive modders put the desk back. I looked at the forearm of my Steve Shirt, saw it was time for lunch, and thought café Mac pizza.
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i can’t mark it funny or insightful, but it was damn good.
Man, if only there was some way to connect the Apple Vision Pro to the iPod Hi-Fi to use iTunes Ping in high fidelity VR.
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You need to setup your MobileMe account on your eMac and reboot on your MacOS 9 partition after reconnecting your U2 iPod.
i’m honestly surprised there aren’t enough hardcore fans to keep sales up.
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There’re broke after buying every year the new iPhone that is basically the same as the previous year but more expensive.
It needs two things...
1) (most importantly) a reason to exist. What can this device do better than others? What “killer apps” exist for it? We’re not there yet…software needs to come out to make the thing more useful. Right now, it’s an extremely expensive toy, which leads me to my next point…
2) It needs to be significantly cheaper. $3500+ is a hard sell to ANYONE, regardless of income! Even at $1000 it will be a hard sell. It needs to cost $500 or less to be a mainstream consideration, and people will only pay that if #1 is there…
Right now, people are paying to either be beta testers or developers…give the tech a few years to mature.
Hypothetically, if I’m a game developer, is there even a good way for me to develop VR games? Something that doesn’t involve downloading proprietary libraries and agreeing to the arbitrary terms of every manufacturer, doesn’t require me to have accounts with Facebook or Apple, etc.?
I have a vague interest in playing with this stuff, but not enough to jump through hoops. The last time I looked into it, it wasn’t like OpenGL or Vulkan where one could just program to a standard and open API. Or, at least, it didn’t look like it would be; information was scarce.
Is astigmatism really considered “complex”? I think prism correction is relatively uncommon; but astigmatism is just “cylinder” (CYL), and everyone in my family has that on their prescriptions.
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It’s hard to believe that this needs to be explained, but astigmatism is irregular lens or corneal curvature that (obviously) varies from person to person and from eye to eye.
Catering to people with astigmatism means that Apple would have to (at least) triple the number of options needed for correction, which they pretty obviously wouldn’t want to do given the beta nature of this whole launch.
It’s yet another reason that people need to be able to wear their own glasses/contact in order for VR/AR to be widely accepted.
Re: Re:
Sure. My point was relating to the quote “prescription lenses for glasses wearers (more complex issues like astigmatism weren’t supported)”. Is there actually a large group of people who can benefit from such lenses? That is, people who have only “sphere” numbers with no cylinder? (Wikipedia says upward of 50% of people are astigmatic.) Or are they just expecting people with astigmatism to ignore that part of their prescription and hope it doesn’t cause too much (more) nausea?
The custom lenses would be expensive and need to be updated every time one’s prescription changes. That makes that a bad option in any case, but a terrible one if they can’t handle actual prescriptions. Perhaps Apple’s middle-aged middle-managers have forgotten that eyesight doesn’t really stabilize till one’s early 20s (at which age disposable income tends to be limited) and not yet noticed that it tends to de-stabilize by age 50 or 60.
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The closest I can think of is Unity. (Insert canned laughter)
Unfortunately, VR is so niche there’s no good (read:FOSS-friendly) way or approaches to developing a VR game without having to pore through at least one corp-friendly ToS.
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You missed a word: Karl didn’t say that astigmatism is “complex,” he said it was “more complex,” which it is; it’s more complex than nearsightedness or farsightedness.
would you rather...
have AR devices with the form factor of
-A. regular pair of glasses/shades
-B. a single/pair of contact lenses
There’s not a lot of software available for the vision pro it can be used for watching movies browsing the web editing but most people don’t want to wear a headset for hours.its got a limited appeal theres already headsets available if you like VR gaming
Maybe in 10 years there,ll be light
vr headsetss that’ are comfortable to wear
Vr ar have been over hyped
Now the next big thing is AI
Even apple can’t make a headset that’s comfortable to wear for long periods of time
There’ll probably never be another device that Apple can make that makes billions in profit
Apple can make great software and it mostly respects the privacy of it’s users
Millions of people buy iPhones the market for expensive Vr Headsets is niche market
Many people don’t like Vr it makes them dizzy or nauseous
While anyone can play games on a PC or games console
I think the next apple product will maybe a folding phone
Even apple has limits after years of work it gave up on the apple car
probably because it can hardly compete
And make a good profit with high quality cars made in China
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Isn’t that mostly because they’re bad, though? If, as you say, they eventually become comfortable—physically, and also in terms of nauseation and resolution—people might be as willing to wear them as headphones (it’s common to wear headphones for many hours at a time, including noise-blocking or noise-canceling ones, though I can personally only tolerate open or semi-open).
This seems to be the type of half-baked product that, like the flickery and nauseating Virtual Boy and its contemporaries, could kill the entire market in which it exists, possibly for decades. People have wanted “Virtual Reality” to work ever since they read Snow Crash or saw it on Star Trek: TNG or Sword Art Online—nevermind that it went badly in all of these—but nobody can seem to get it past the “hype” phase. Things were looking good for Oculus (in a technical sense; fuck the account requirements), but interest and advancement seem to have leveled off years ago. It’s a bit mystifying that Apple decided it was a good idea to launch this now, without it being hugely better.
What an odd article. Seems more personal animus than actual facts.
Hi TD
You used that word “orgasm” in that first parapgraph, that is the fist hint to solve this problem, if there ever is one.
You want a piece of technology that goes through the roof?
Make it open to the porn industry.
There , fixed it for you.
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There are VR porn movies AND games.
The market seems to be unimpressed.
And unfortunately, I’m talking about the Japanese market.
Killer app for AR
Here’s my killer VR app: Remote human assistant…
Basically, I am trying to repair something unfamiliar, and wearing something like google glass with the camera adjacent my eye and a display overlaying whatever machinery is in front of me. My remote partner, an expert, half a world away, has a large video screen and a pointer, and he is talking me through the work…little red arrow, put the meter probe here, now a wrench on that bolt there, that’s the gate lead…
“And I still generally don’t think this tech truly becomes interesting until cords are eliminated, self-contained battery life becomes wholly irrelevant, weight is a non-factor, and the interfaces become seamlessly intuitive to the point of near-magic.”
Pick one.