In a recent interview, Tim Cook himself acknowledged that Vision Pro’s hefty price tag is a barrier to widespread adoption of the product. “At $3,500,” he admitted to The Wall Street Journal, “it’s not a mass-market product. Right now, it’s an early-adopter product.”
You might think, then, that getting down the price would be a priority at Apple Park, and pundits believe the company is working on a (comparatively) budget-focused model, perhaps called the Vision SE or just plain Vision and pitched at around $2,000. But the latest reports indicate that this won’t arrive any time soon.
The next item on Apple’s mixed-reality release schedule, agree the respected analysts Ming-Chi Kuo and Mark Gurman, is instead an upgraded and presumably identically priced version of Vision Pro, which will see the device’s M2 processor chip replaced by the as yet unreleased M5. (The most advanced chips currently available in Apple products are the M4 family.) In a post on Twitter yesterday, Kuo predicted that this model will appear in 2025, while Gurman discussed the upgrade in his Power On newsletter this weekend but didn’t specify a timeframe.
The budget model, Kuo explains, has been delayed to a launch “beyond 2027.”
Why would Apple prioritize another $3,499 headset instead of something within the reach of a larger market? Well, Kuo suspects that cutting the price wouldn’t actually move the needle significantly on unit sales because it wouldn’t create “successful use cases.”
“Simply reducing the price wouldn’t help create successful use cases,” he writes. “It’s similar to the HomePod situation—even after launching the cheaper HomePod mini, Apple’s smart speakers failed to become mainstream products.” It’s certainly true that most potential customers struggle to see how Vision Pro would fit into their lives. It doesn’t yet have a killer app that would justify the outlay of $1,000, let alone $2,000 or $3,499.
But a further headache for Project Vision SE is the loss of the wow factor. Vision Pro may not be a practical choice for 99% of Apple fans but it does reliably blow them away when they experience a demo. But Vision SE, in order to get that price down, is likely to involve substantial compromises and key feature cuts. And at this point in the product’s lifecycle, Apple may simply feel that these compromises are unacceptable.
Read our Vision Pro review.
Author: David Price, Editor, Macworld
David has been writing about technology for well over two decades, and got on board the Apple hype train when covering the original iPhone launch in 2007. He is an enthusiastic Apple Watch evangelist and feels that the HomePod is misunderstood.