Apple Reportedly Slows Down Vision Pro Production: Is This the End?

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According to The Information, Apple is “sharply” scaling back the production of Vision Pro.

Obviously, immediately, this has resulted in lots of clickbait headlines suggesting that this could be the end of Apple’s mixed reality headset. Pesky press, eh?

Ahem.

Anyway, as always, there’s a lot more to this story than meets the eye, and it’s a topic that continues to fascinate me.

It has to fascinate me – I’m the berk who imported Vision Pro into the UK at great expense back in February under the pretence that it would be a hit with my audience. It wasn’t. We’ve generated more views recently for the iPad mini and AirPods Max – by some distance – and both of those products are as old as the hills.

So, what’s going on?

They’re not canning it

Apple is, demonstrably, not pulling the plug on Vision Pro. If you read between the headlines, it’s clear that little has changed; Tim Cook is simply asking his team to focus on reducing the price of his mixed reality headset by making a more approachable version for the masses. To my knowledge, that has always been the case – it’s the most logical next step for Vision Pro and visionOS.

Speaking to The Wall Street Journal recently about Vision Pro, Cook noted that the current version is for “people who want to have tomorrow’s technology today”, and that “fortunately, there’s enough people who are in that camp that it’s exciting”. Make of that what you will. It’s Tim’s job to be bullish about his company’s products – he’s the CEO. At least he understands that, at £3,500, Vision Pro was never going to be a mass market hit.

The question is, can we really believe that Apple hasn’t at least thought about pulling the plug on Vision Pro? When we take into consideration the many challenges they face in making it a more affordable, less cumbersome product, it’s hard not to raise an eyebrow.

The problem with Vision Pro

Vision Pro is heavy and uncomfortable to wear for long periods. You’re also permanently attached to an external battery pack which makes you look even more daft than you do wearing a VR headset in the first place (Vision Pro joins all such headsets in that regard).

That’s the main problem with Vision Pro and mixed reality in general at this point: it looks daft, makes you feel a bit nauseous at times, and you can’t share the experience with anyone – unless you invite their avatar into your weird world. Which is weird.

Then, we have the competition. I recently reviewed the Meta Quest 3S, the £290 marvel, and was stunned by how much value it offered. At a fraction of the price of Vision Pro, it delivers the same operating system experience and has a much larger library of apps and games. Oh, the battery is built into the headset, too. The quality of the experience, technically, is vastly below what Vision Pro offers, but it’s still great for the money.

This means Vision Pro has a huge mountain to climb, which brings me to what has always been my persistent concern about Apple’s headset.

My persistent concern about Vision Pro

I dread to think how many hours and billions of dollars Apple poured into Vision Pro and visionOS. A product that polished doesn’t arrive after an all-nighter. It takes years. And more money than to which most businesses have access.

This means the journey towards the current Vision Pro headset started long ago – way before the AI revolution. Who knows – maybe it was one of Steve Jobs’ last projects. Whenever it started, it was a very different world back then, and I’ve always worried that Apple found itself far too deep into an expensive project that couldn’t be easily diverted, pivoted, or cancelled entirely.

So, when February arrived and Vision Pro launched, the problem wasn’t just the price tag or the less-than-favourable reviews, it was the fact that everyone was preoccupied with the impact – both good and bad – of AI on their lives and livelihoods.

Equally – and I can say this with some confidence, given my job – most regular consumers don’t care about the latest forward-thinking tech. They just want a great phone that has a decent battery and takes good photos. They want a car that doesn’t cost the earth to run and which has enough modern conveniences to make each journey a cinch. Despite what we’re led to believe by the arms race that’s currently underway between brands, they really don’t care about AI.

This makes Vision Pro’s job even harder. I’ve given it to a bunch of my friends and family, all of whom have been bowled over by what it can do, yet none of them could think of a real-world application for it – and all of them were more than ready to take it off after a relatively short time.

We shouldn’t blame Apple for attempting to innovate, though – nor should they be laughed at for, once again, jumping on something long after many others have already entered the field. They did that with the iPhone, remember?

The future is glasses, not headsets

Let me just quickly counter everything above: Vision Pro is a groundbreaking product. If you’re yet to experience what it’s capable of, I highly recommend visiting an Apple Store and giving the demo a go – it’s impossible not to be blown away.

Vision Pro also really does show us – literally – a glimpse into the future of computing. I’m totally with Cook on this; I don’t for one minute think that my two-year-old son will have a smartphone by the time he reaches the age of 18. He’ll be wearing a pair of glasses which do everything a smartphone did for his dad all those years ago.

We’ve seen glimpses of this from Meta, recently, who showed off the Meta Orion glasses at the company’s annual conference. They’re not publicly available and cost a fortune to make – and I’m sure there are endless compromises – but that’s what Apple is working towards. The future is glasses, not these massive, heavy, expensive headsets.

Is Meta ahead of Apple on this? It’s hard to say. We don’t know just how far Orion is from becoming a mass-market product – it feels like a long road for that to become a reality. But it feels like an even longer road for Vision Pro to reach that stage.

When you hold Vision Pro in your hands, you realise how long it will take Apple to reduce the size of every component to enable a glasses-based mixed reality experience. Remember – Apple will not compromise on quality. For a pair of glasses to be good enough for them, they’ll need to provide the exact same experience as the one we get from visionOS at the moment in that massive headset.

Will we get there? I have mixed feelings, to be honest, but it’s going to be a fascinating journey.

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