Report: Apple Has Halted Production Of Its Colossally Expensive Vision Pro VR

Apple has certainly carved itself a market for selling extremely well-made products at ludicrously high prices. Given an audience willing to fork out eye-watering amounts for its laptops and phones, it’s perhaps not surprising that the company assumed it could do the same in the cursed world of VR with the $3,500 Vision Pro mixed-reality goggles. Except, according to sourced reports, it couldn’t. The Vision Pro is said to no longer be in production.

This is all based on a report from October 2024 on The Information (a site that, appositely, charges $300 to $1,000 a year to read its articles) which claimed, based on multiple sources, that Apple would be winding down production on the Vision Pro as the year ended, given the backlog of unsold devices. There was also rumor of a cheaper model going into production instead of a previously planned second version of the Pro, potentially for an end-of-year 2025 release.

The Vision Pro’s failure to set the world aflame is perhaps somewhat predictable. Not only does absolutely no one actually want mixed-reality headsets for their work life, but they especially don’t want to pay the price of a second-hand car for the honor. At $3.5k, you’d have to hope the Vision Pro came with a suite of absolutely essential apps and uses, and, er, it didn’t do that either.

Back in October, The Information said its sources at component manufacturers told the site they’d supplied enough parts for over half a million headsets, with “tens of thousands of undelivered parts” filling the suppliers’ warehouses. It was claimed at the time that Apple had sold 370,000 Vision Pros—a figure that seems enormously optimistic, but one that allegedly represents only two-thirds of the stock that had been made. Compare that to the millions of units Meta has shifted of its Meta Quest VR headsets, at a seventh of the price of Apple’s tech.

If all this proves to be accurate, that means that as of now Apple is no longer making new Vision Pros, because just not enough people saw a reason to pay such a whacking fee for such an entirely superfluous piece of tech. As MacRumors points out, Apple had reportedly originally asked its Chinese manufacturer to expect to make eight million Vision Pros, meaning it’s likely sold a twentieth of its initial expectations. The reports claim Apple has told the manufacturer to expect to make half that many for its next, cheaper version of the AR headset which, while suggesting a massive drop in expectation even at a cheaper price, still seems ludicrously unlikely.

Meta’s relative success with the Quest VR headsets in 2024 is likely due to its finding that sweet price point of $300 to $500, where people are more willing to take a gamble on a piece of unproven tech. Arguably, Apple could still find its niche in this space, if it can get things down to $1,000 and capture the business market that feels obliged to jump on gimmicks, leading to overworked people in hot suits being forced to look at virtual Power Point demonstrations until they quit their jobs and take up macrame.

We’ve contacted Apple for a comment.

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