TECH NEWS – According to an analyst, the Cupertino-based company has been carefully considering what to do with its very expensive (and therefore admittedly niche) AR headset.
Production of the first-generation Apple Vision Pro will cease at the end of the year, and it’s reasonable to assume that the company is working on the inferior model so that a more affordable version can debut sometime in 2025. But it might be better not to count on that, as TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote on Twitter that production of the budget headset has been moved to after 2027, and the next-generation model will come instead…
“My understanding is that production of the cheaper Vision Pro has been delayed beyond 2027 for some time now. This means that Apple’s only new head-mounted display device in 2025 will be the Vision Pro with an upgraded M5 processor. I think what really drove Apple to delay the cheaper Vision Pro is that simply lowering the price wouldn’t help create successful use cases. It’s similar to the HomePod situation – even after launching the cheaper HomePod mini, Apple’s smart speakers failed to become mainstream products,” Kuo wrote.
The cheaper Apple Vision Pro would have cost about $2,000 and used an A-series (iPhone) chipset instead of one of the M chips, and the display’s pixel density would have been much lower. Instead, the next-generation model could arrive next year, with spatial computing and Apple Intelligence support. Mass production could start in the second half of 2025, July at the earliest.
VisionOS 2 will have at least a few new features, including a travel mode and a virtual Mac display that will be ultra-wide, making it more productive to use. But this is still a very young hardware category, and it’s no coincidence that Apple CEO Tim Cook said that tomorrow’s technology is being offered today…
Source: WCCFTech