Apple unveiled its long-awaited “mixed reality” headset on Monday, in its most anticipated product launch since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad in 2010.
The gadget, called Vision Pro, will be available “early next year.” It combines virtual and augmented reality, which superimposes digital images on top of the real world. Apple said it will sell it for $3,499, more than most analysts expected and about 12 times the price of Meta’s Quest 2, its best-selling VR headset.
The Vision Pro is the biggest gamble on a product yet from CEO Tim Cook, who took over from Steve Jobs in 2011. Cook has long been hailed as the operations genius who catapulted Apple’s market value from about $350 billion in 2011 to nearly $2.9. tn now, but has long been criticized for repeating past ideas and delaying projects like the Apple Car.
Tim Bajarin, a consultant with Creative Strategies, said the headset’s launch should “enhance Cook’s legacy” outside of operations. That wouldn’t put him in the same class as Steve, but Steve was a self-contained visionary. Cook carried his vision into the future.
Cook said Monday that the headset will be used to “seamlessly blend the real world with the digital world,” and was “the first Apple product that you look at and don’t look at.” Noting that the company doesn’t expect the device to become a big seller in the near term, he said the launch marks “the beginning of a journey” into what the company calls “spatial computing,” predicting that it will one day become as important as personal computing on the Mac and the iPhone’s introduction to computing. portable.
In a pre-recorded video presentation shown at the start of its annual Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple showed off the headset as being used to play video games, watch entertainment on large “virtual” screens, collaborate by working together on documents, and watch multiple video calls.
“When you actually test it and see it in action, it’s amazing,” said Bajarin, who has used the device. “If you are watching a sports match, you are actually in the stadium. You are in front of the action. And if the movie is in 3D, you are almost in a 3D world.”
The device’s price and narrow range of applications are expected to limit its use in the early years to gaming and a range of specialized uses in the workplace. The headset is also aimed at software developers, who Apple hopes will build a wide range of virtual and augmented reality applications.
“Gaming has been the killer use of VR so far, but what Apple is doing is appealing to a completely different audience — it’s a casual headset, it’s something you could give your parents,” said Liu Gebe, an analyst at CCS Insight. . “The flip side is that they cost $3,500, so I won’t be able to buy one for my parents for quite some time.”
Apple shares hit a record high before the announcement, rising by more than 2 percent to $184.91 and surpassing the previous record set in January 2022, before falling back with the unveiling of the headset. The shares closed down 0.8 percent today, at $179.58.
Apple has aimed the device toward white-collar workers, saying it would be the “perfect workspace”. But in a move that surprised analysts who expected the product to be aimed primarily at business users, Apple offered people to look at photos and videos, read documents, and browse the web.
Apple said the Vision Pro can be your “personal movie theater,” with a screen “100 feet wide” and automatic dimming of the real world around the screen. Its shows mainly showed people using a headset to view 2D screens, as opposed to the full 3D virtual worlds Meta had created.
Apple has been “playing on productivity and work, as well as entertainment, so you think differently about the price point,” said Carolina Milanesi, founder of The Heart of Tech, a research group.
Bob Iger, CEO of The Walt Disney Company called Vision Pro a “revolutionary platform” and said it would allow Disney to create content that was not possible before. A video created by Disney showed Mickey Mouse jumping from a picture frame into the wearer’s living room, jumping on furniture. However, the only service Disney announced for the device at launch was existing Disney Plus streaming video content.
Apple’s revenue is expected to drop 2 percent in the current fiscal year, which ends in September, and most analysts expect it to sell only about 200,000 Vision Pro headphones in the first year. Still, Wall Street hopes the device will become a solid contributor to the company’s revenue within five years, with the potential to one day become the most important computing platform since the launch of the iPhone.
Kicking off its annual conference call on Monday, Apple also announced faster versions of its Mac studio desktop, the 15-inch MacBook Air, and the first Mac Pro with “Apple Silicon” — completing a multi-year phaseout of Intel chips across its entire portfolio. It promised that the latest computers had “outrageous performance.”