The FT reports about Apple’s major manufacturing difficulties regarding its VR/AR headset, Vision Pro. According to an inner resource, in 2024 will be only 400,000 units instead of 1,000,000. The biggest gamble of Apple.
Vision Pro: From 1,000,000 to 400,000
As stated by Reuters, reported by the FT (Financial Times), and based on people with direct knowledge of the process, Apple has been forced to make major cuts to production forecasts for its Vision Pro augmented-reality headset due to design complexities. The Vision Pro, launched last month and expected to be available early next year in the U.S., has a starting price of $3,499 – over three times the cost of the priciest headset in Meta’s line of mixed and virtual reality devices. The report said Chinese contract manufacturer Luxshare, Apple’s only assembler of the device, was preparing to make fewer than 400,000 units of Vision Pro in 2024, which is below Apple’s earlier internal sales target of 1,000,000 units in the first 12 months. Senior analysts are emphasizing that Apple’s Vision Pro headset was already running up against challenges, given its high price point, and now it’s veered into another potential setback. It appears that a serious difficulty in the production process is the manufacturing of the micro-OLED displays for the device, with Apple being unsatisfied with the yield of micro-OLEDs that are free of defects.
The biggest gamble of Apple
The Vision Pro is one of the most challenging, complicated, and unconventional products that Apple has introduced. Top developers spent a decade of R&D-ing their VR capabilities to meet demands that had never been tested before in real-life situations. Vision Pro has a vast amount of utilizations. However, we’ve been focusing on its capabilities regarding editing, or should we say, to sharpen the new era of spatial editing, which is tremendous progress compared to ‘regular’ headset editing. As Apple has stopped further upgrading its flagship NLE (Final Cut Pro), and instead released the iPad version, in an unofficial claim that the upcoming Vision Pro will support it, we reached the hypothesis that a lot of resources would be invested to allow Vision Pro to edit professionally go FCP for iPad. However, it’s a gamble, and Apple knows that.
