Apple Vision Pro - Visionary? Or Very Expensive?

VR people and tech enthusiasts have been waiting for Apple to enter the VR market since 2015. There were 'patent filing' watchers that assured us that Apple was poised to release its own headset for years, based on the patents they were required to file publically.

That headset release didn't come until 2023, and in some ways surprised many who had been wondering if it would ever happen.

When it did, the price was massive compared to the current offering from Meta - at around 5X the price, this would always have a limited market.

Tech pundits have tried to backwards engineer and guess Apple's ultimate strategy with the AVP, yet Apple have been fairly transparent from the beginning. This was a first release, testing the upper end of the market (and Apple fanbois) for their willingness to pay for and use a headset for enterprise applications - potentially replacing other devices.

Keyboard warriors - the 'VR is Dead' people had a ton of criticisms, mainly around its price and the lack of a complete ready-to-go ecosystem. Second point - ridiculous - its a first generation release. First point - fair enough - though Apple weren't born yesterday, and with their access to literally billions of points of tech sales data, they would have known exactly what they were doing.

The AVP firmly planted Apple's desired position in the market - at the uncompromising high premium quality. Apple was clearly not trying to compete with the Meta Quest range - that much is clear - but whether they were testing the pricing for tech enthusiasts or affluent buyers remains to be seen. Given Apple fans are always willing to pay a premium for the brand and the integrative ecosystem - it might have been what marketers call a 'price anchoring moment'.

Beyond this point, any future headset priced lower than the original AVP is going to look like an opportunity simply through the comparison - even if it is still multiples of the cost of a Quest.

The Samsung/Google offering 'Project Moohan' will reportedly have similar high end specs to the AVP, so that is encouraging for the creators looking to produce up to standard rather than down to price point. The quality of conventional displays in phones and TV's means that potential consumers are going to be using these as their point of reference, so for VR to succeed, it needs to arrive without excuses.