Abanti Chowdhury/BI
Apple is still figuring out its road map to launching another life-changing device.
When the Vision Pro headset launched in February, the $3,500 price tag and lack of a really great app gave mainstream consumers pause. Since then, Apple has been considering ways to push the headset product line forward and attract new customers, Bloomberg reported.
Those efforts reportedly include a cheaper and lighter headset than the Vision Pro and augmented reality glasses.
But changing the landscape of the tech industry can't happen overnight, and Apple has been known to take its time developing products. It finally announced the highly-anticipated Apple Intelligence feature at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June — weeks after competitors hosted splashy artificial intelligence demonstrations and years after ChatGPT took the world by storm.
The seemingly lackluster response to the expensive Vision Pro launch has led execs working on the product to do a bit of soul-searching around the way forward for the headset, Bloomberg said. They want to make Vision Pro a more mainstream product, though with both higher- and lower-price options.
Making a cheaper product is trickier, however. Apple has spent years working on a headset that would cost between $1,500 and $2,000, which is slated to be released by the end of 2025, according to Bloomberg.
That headset might be missing key features like EyeSight — the slightly creepy virtual pair of eyes on the lens of the headset — and it would need to be connected to a Mac or iPhone to work.
There's also a second generation of the Vision Pro in the works that could be faster, lighter, and more comfortable than its predecessor, but it won't arrive until the end of 2026 at the earliest.
Apple is also trying to develop augmented reality glasses, Bloomberg said. Although smart glasses have been slow to catch on with buyers, tech companies haven't abandoned their efforts — like, for example, Meta's Ray-Ban product. Apple has proved successful with wearable devices, like the Apple Watch, but it's too soon to know much about its AR glasses other than a tentative launch date in 2027.
Meanwhile, Apple is ditching other projects that it was once excited about. The company killed its self-driving car plans in February and recently got rid of Apple Pay Later — a service that was supposed to rival businesses like Affirm and Klarna.
It's yet to be seen whether this re-do of its plans for future Vision Pro technology will be what it needs to revolutionize the market, like the iPhone, or whether Apple will just have to come up with something else to get future consumers excited.
