Is the 2024 launch of the Apple Vision Pro a big con?

According to a report in The Financial Times, shared by 9to5mac, Apple has cut its initial Apple Vision Pro production target of one million units back to four hundred thousand, a massive cutback indeed. According to the report, the cutback is due to the design complexity of the device. 

Apple initially expected to produce one million units by 2024, so losing six hundred thousand units is a major production hit. However, this could also be a clever marketing ruse to stir consumer thirst, or there are serious production issues. 

What’s the hold up? 

According to the report, the Apple Vision Pro’s build process is highly complicated thanks in part to how advanced the technology goes into making the AVP. One of the major complications is caused by Apple, including the EyeSight display, which creepily projects the user’s eyes for others to see.

The embedded cameras used to create the awful user eye projection need to be calibrated a certain way during production, creating bottlenecks within the manufacturing process. The calibration has to account for the curvature of the glass used in Apple’s VR/AR goggles. Also, there has been a slowdown in the production of the 4K micro-OLED displays used for each eye within the units. 

Luxshare, the Chinese manufacturer used to build the AVP, had a goal of up to one million units for the 2024 release but will now, due to the complications involved, have cut the number by six hundred thousand, which is a massive cut. Luxshare also works with Apple to produce Airpods and some MacBooks. The company’s stock price took a hit once the news leaked about its rolling back of the production of the AVP.

What else is affected? 

While Apple announced the Vision Pro during WWDC 2023, it was also mentioned that a more affordable version of AR/VR glasses was in development. Luxshare, for its part, was looking at ramping up production to eighteen million units, but all of this is now possible in a holding pattern. 

It was hoped that the second, more affordable version of the Apple Vision Pro would be coming in 2025, but with Apple’s partners struggling to produce enough of the first-gen AVP, it looks like we will not see the second-gen unit until 2026 or later. 

For all we know, Apple knew from day one it could not produce the supposed one million units for 2024, and letting it leak just made the four hundred thousand they can have that much more valuable to Apple stans and developers. We could see the already $3,499 Apple Vision Pros shoot up in price due to scarcity, which would only make it a bigger success for the unstoppable tech Goliath. 

Was the announcement of the Apple Vision Pro at WWDC the world’s greatest bait and switch? Who knows, but there are always the Meta Quest folks.