Apple: Vision Pro headset looks good but doesn’t offer any new ideas for VR

There’s building suspense and then forcing your audience to sit through a two-hour presentation before announcing that your hotly anticipated, much-delayed virtual reality headset won’t go on sale until next year.

By the time Apple unveiled its VR glasses on Monday, the stock price had lost its intraday record high. Possible culprits include a lack of compelling content, a high price tag, and a 2024 launch date.

Apple is a pro at classy designs and quality productions. But are VR headsets a good use of that $166 billion pile of cash and marketable securities? Limited battery life and bulky fit still plague the field. Meta’s VR unit reported falling revenue last quarter and an operating loss of nearly $4 billion. Apple hasn’t broken out figures showing the cost of development.

The company’s curved, ski-goggle-styled headsets seem most comfortable. Twelve cameras and various sensors create video of the real world then overlay VR – meaning the wearer can be immersed in online life without ever having to lace up their shoes. Instead of handheld devices, the controls are hand or voice activated. There’s a creepy-looking display that shows the wearer’s eyes if people are around and an annoying cord connected to an external battery pack.

Display quality is high. The headset has 23mn pixels. As Apple says, that’s more than a 4K TV in front of each eye. It’s powered by Apple’s own M2 chips and a new chip called the R1, part of an ongoing determination to reduce reliance on outside suppliers like Qualcomm and Broadcom.

Apple is hardly the first one off the block. LG Electronics released a touchscreen smartphone before the iPhone and Samsung was selling smartwatches before the Apple Watch. But it has a track record of selling popular, high-quality versions of hardware.

At $3,499, however, Apple hasn’t priced its Vision Pro quite as mass-consumer friendly. For example, they are seven times more expensive than the latest version of Meta. Yet the presentation was not enterprise-focused. Perhaps it hopes to start a whole new market of apps from third-party developers.

To displace the iPhone’s importance to Apple’s revenue, it would need to sell around 60mn headsets a year. It seems impossible. Happily, Apple has the means to experiment. Free cash flow was five times the size of Meta last year. Chief executive Tim Cook can afford to try VR without betting Apple’s future on the technology.