Apple’s Mixed Reality headset, Vision Pro, is here

While Apple’s strategy of bidding its time before entering a product category has served the company well in the past, its official entry into mixed reality comes at a curious time. Virtual reality and augmented reality have been around in one form or another for decades, but have not yet achieved mass adoption.

VR headset shipments will drop more than 20 percent by 2022, according to research from the International Data Corporation. IDC attributed this to the limited number of suppliers in the market, a challenging macroeconomic environment and a lack of consumer acceptance by the mass market.” According to The Wall Street Journal, citing Pitchbook, venture capital investments in VR startups are also down significantly from a few years ago. After $6.3 billion was funneled into VR in 2019, last year’s investment was $4.8 billion. (It’s unclear exactly how much of that money will go to generative AI, the latest wave in the technology hype cycle.)

Meta has come closest to making a dent in the VR market: its moderately priced Meta Quest and Quest 2 VR headsets have outsold most, with a reported 20 million units sold since the product’s launch. And the company just announced the Meta Quest 3, a rush job ahead of Apple’s big announcement. According to IDC, Meta headsets make up nearly 80 percent of the market.

Still, Meta is struggling to sell its much more expensive model, the $1,000 Meta Quest Pro. And it has poured billions of dollars into its “metaverse” strategy to achieve this bit of success. The company has said it expects losses from Reality Labs, its VR arm, to increase significantly on a year-over-year basis in 2023.

But some remain optimistic about mixed reality’s potential to go mainstream, driven in part by Apple’s entry into the fray. After revising its outlook for VR-AR shipments for this year due to weak demand in 2022, IDC said it still expects shipments to grow 14 percent in 2023 and continue to grow for the next five years. Jitesh Ubrani, a research manager who tracks mobile and consumer devices, said in an analyst note that “Sony’s new PSVR2 and Apple’s foray into space will help generate additional volume, while new devices from Meta and Pico, expected by the end of 2023, will creating momentum for VR in 2024.”

Peggy Johnson, the CEO of AR company Magic Leap, said in an interview with WIRED that Apple’s entry into the market is “definitely a good thing” for the rest of the industry. “We’ve been largely on our own for over a decade, doing R&D and trying to get a real augmented reality system working,” Johnson said. “And there were years before that of technical expenses. So it’s great when we see someone come into this space because it helps the entire ecosystem. It’s a big confirmation.”

Some app developers are also excited about the prospects. “I think this could be a Tesla Roadster moment for mixed reality,” said Anand Agarawala, co-founder and CEO of AR/VR company Spatial. “Apple is so good at making hardware, they’re so good at UX, in a way that other people who’ve entered the space haven’t been. So I think this could be a really ‘imaginative’ year .”

It could indeed be a “Tesla Roadster” moment, in that when the electric car first became available, some wondered if it was a “precious toy” or the start of a new era. At best for Apple, both can be true.

This story has been updated with more details on Apple Vision Pro pricing and availability.