The new M5 Vision Pro is boring, but it may be the right move for Apple

Today, Apple has announced the launch of the new Vision Pro… which is basically the same as the old one. It’s a pretty disappointing move for us all, but I think that, at the end of the day, it may be a good move for Apple. Let’s see why.

The new old Apple Vision Pro

In case you missed the news, I’ll summarize it for you: Apple has announced the launch of a refresh of the current Apple Vision Pro. The device is the same as the previous one (same price, same weight, etc), and it only features a new, more comfortable headband (the Dual Knit Band) and the M5 processor instead of the previous M2. It is being released on October 22nd.

Together with the new headset, Apple is also announcing the official launch of the Logitech Stylus and the PSVR 2 controllers, which are being sold separately so that you can pair them with the Vision Pro headset.

Let’s be honest: no one is excited about this new Vision Pro, which is basically identical to the old one.

To add insult to injury, the rumors from Mark Gurman and the other “Apple analysts” tell us that Apple has canceled the upcoming “cheaper” Vision Air and that it has moved its priorities from headsets to glasses, lured by the success that Meta is having with the Ray-Ban Meta.

The XR community has always been expecting a lot from Apple: almost everyone has been waiting for Apple to release a headset for 10 years, because “Apple is the only one that can make XR mainstream”… and then Apple is deprioritizing Virtual Reality (oh sorry, Mixed Reality, as Tim Cook likes to call it) after its first attempt. This is kind of ironic.

My provoking question: Who was the Vision Air for?

Of course, I’m with you. I would like XR to succeed, and I’m hoping that at a certain point, when we say that “next year is the year of XR”, it is going to be true. But Apple is a company, and its priority is making revenue, not making us happy. When I wrote the postmortem about my first failed startup, I said that I learned the hard way that “a startup is all about money”. Well, the same holds even more for a tech behemoth like Apple.

And the question I ask you is: what economic advantage would Apple have had in launching a $2000 Vision Air next year? According to the rumors, this would have been a less performant headset than the Vision Pro, cheaper than the Vision Pro, but still sold for a lot of money. This means that people already having the Vision Pro wouldn’t have bought it because they already have a better headset, and the people not having the Vision Pro wouldn’t have bought it, either, because $2000 is still a lot of money. I mean, I’m sure there would have been some market, but it would have still been a niche one, not worth the big effort for organizing a new supply chain, new manufacturing processes, and a new big marketing launch. I think things will change when the price can get closer to $1000-$1300, while still offering a good experience.

I guess we can have some sort of proof of what I’m saying pretty soon: next week, Samsung is finally launching “Project Moohan”, the mixed reality headset made with Google. Moohan will have many similarities to what Vision Air should have been: a price around $2000, with a cheaper processor than Vision Pro, no front screen, and more comfortable. I’m pretty sure that Moohan will sell some hundred thousand units in its first year, but then that will be it. Moohan will also be helped in its sales by the fact that it is the first Android XR headset, while a cheaper Vision Air would just have been the second VisionOS device.

I mean, I would be happy to be wrong, and if Moohan sells 10 million units in the first year, I’m pretty sure that this will make all companies (Apple included) change their strategy. But I don’t think it’s gonna happen.

Mixed Reality has failed its mission

I have always been a big believer in Mixed Reality… I was even the first one, with the team at NTW, to launch a mixed reality game for a standalone headset (the Vive Focus Plus back in 2019).

But let’s be honest: MR has never taken off. I have already analyzed why in another article, so I won’t repeat the reasons here. What I’ll repeat is that the appeal has not been the one we were hoping for: there are nice MR games and applications, but no “killer apps” yet. No system sellers made with MR, on no headset. This means that there is no compelling use case. And who would spend $2000 for a device that has not many compelling use cases? Very few people.

Apple has bet everything on “Mixed Reality”. It was so much believing in MR, that Tim Cook even refused to use the term Virtual Reality, and VR was relegated to being “Immersive mixed reality” (a term that has no damn sense, either the reality is immersive or mixed). This bet did not pay out, so now they need to bet on something else. And glasses seem promising…

But… the Vision Pro is a fantastic TV!

Sure, I love the resolution of the Vision Pro, and Apple is releasing some impressive videos for it. But the hypothesis that “Vision Pro will be the new plasma TV” is not working at this point. I personally know no one who has decided to buy a Vision Pro instead of a big TV. Again, I’m sure this is going to happen one day, but that day is not today.

There are many reasons for that, and one is, of course, that the TV can be watched for hours, while the Vision Pro is destroying your face after one hour maximum. A TV can be watched by many people together. It is also part of how our house appears. The Vision Pro… not yet.

Yes, I’ve met over the years many Vision Pro enthusiasts… they are all amazing people, and I love them. I was there in the Bay Area after the launch of the Vision Pro at WWDC, and I could feel the enthusiasm of these great guys and gals.

But still, Apple is a company and needs to think about its business logic. HoloLens had a wonderful community, too, and was killed by Microsoft in the snap of a finger, like Thanos did in The Avengers. DayDream was a very interesting operating system, and Google killed it anyway. So, the fact that there are amazing people involved in a decision is not enough to stop a company from following its business goals.

Apple is spending a gazillion dollars on AR/MR, exactly like Meta. It’s just that the two companies operate in a different way.

First of all, Apple is more secretive, while Meta is trying to be very transparent about what they are doing. This is not only for what concerns the disclosure of the spending, but also for what concerns the devices: Meta wants to release many devices to show it is progressing, while Apple can just wait until the time is right to release a headset.

Meta is anyway spending much more money than Apple, and the main reasons are two: the first is that Apple is better organized and efficient, while Meta is more caotic (remember when John Carmack said that Meta could have be twice more efficient? Pepperidge Farm remembers); the second is that Apple has already a very solid infrastructure for hardware manufacturing and distribution, and software distribution, while Meta is building everything from scratch. Think about how there are Apple Stores everywhere, and now Meta has just opened its 2nd store.

Then the companies have different motivations: Apple already has a dominant position in the smartphone sector, while Meta is suffering the fact that its apps have to live on other companies’ platforms. Meta wants to be a platform leader in the next generation, so it needs to make twice the effort to try to have a chance (not even to be sure of succeeding) against Apple and Google. It is not that Meta is doing what it is doing to make us XR enthusiasts happy; it is that it has another business strategy to follow.

And anyway, notwithstanding this, even Meta has lifted its foot from the throttle of VR/MR. It is not abandoning the tech either, but it has deprioritized it to now follow glasses. And these companies all follow each other: if Meta, which invested hundreds of billions in XR, is now pivoting towards glasses, the other companies, of course, are considering this when they decide their strategies, too. I’m pretty sure that the recent moves by Meta have influenced the decisions by Apple.

What about a Vision Pro 2?

Launching a Vision Pro 2 would be another huge undertaking in terms of resources, to just have quite poor sales. A Vision Pro 2 may even be more expensive than a Vision Pro, and if very few people bought the Pro, even fewer will buy the Pro 2. Many people that already invested $3500 would probably not invest another $3500 in a new device if there is not a compelling reason to buy it.

On the B2B side, it would be great to have a new device that is more comfortable, but on the other hand, it would represent a negative disruption for the companies that have bet on the older model.

So I don’t think launching a Vision Pro 2 headset now would have been a great choice.

So why the M5 Vision Pro?

The move of the M5 Vision Pro reminds me a bit of when Pico launched a refresh of its Pico 4 instead of the Pico 5. It is a cheap way to keep the “hope” alive, while making your enterprise customers happy.

Launching a new headset, Apple has proven that it is not abandoning the field… because it is true, I don’t believe it is abandoning mixed reality anytime soon. Since Apple Vision Pro is used in various enterprise projects, this is important: big corporations are very sensitive to the continuity of projects. Now they know that Vision Pro is still alive, and that if one breaks, they can still buy a new one… even a better one, actually.

And this move has been done in a very cheap way: reutilizing the same production processes and the same supply chain. Even the launch was super cheap: instead of organizing a big event to announce this headset, Apple just sent a press release to all magazines. This launch has been a no-brainer. Now the company can easily wait another 1.5-2 years before launching another headset: more time to think, evaluate the growth of the market, and so on. Let’s say that Apple is buying some time to evaluate what to do. And it has plenty of time, because XR is moving so slowly that there is no need to rush at all.

And with the launch of the PSVR 2 controllers and the new headband, Apple managed to offer a quick solution to most of the complaints that people were having with the Vision Pro.

Paradoxically, the M5 Vision Pro is even better for the positioning of Apple than a Vision Air would have been. The Vision Air would have been a Project Moohan with an Apple on it; it would have had no big, distinct feature. The M5 Vision Pro has instead a unique value proposition: the M5 chipset.

The original Vision Pro used an M2 chipset, which was already more powerful than the chips in all other headsets. According to Apple (via Upload VR), M4 has a 50% more powerful CPU and 4 times more powerful GPU than M2. Here we are talking about the M5, which is even one generation later. It’s basically years ahead of all the competition. Apple can comfortably not release anything for two years, and most probably, no other headset will come close to the computational power of the Vision Pro. This is a Unique Value Proposition: if you want the most powerful standalone headset, you need to buy a Vision Pro. Period.

So with the M5 Vision Pro, Apple can still stay in the place it likes the most: being the expensive top device, with unique features (M5, the front display, etc).

This has also practical implications: thanks to the M5 chip, the Vision Pro will be able to do things that the other standalone headsets can not. In the B2B field, this is very important for simulation and high-quality prototyping. I guess it also supports many more LLMs that run locally than an XR2 chipset. So I think the Vision Pro will start appealing to some specific niches that won’t find an alternative elsewhere.

Ultimately, the goal is AR glasses

At the end of the day, don’t forget that Tim Cook’s mission has never been making goggles. He always talked about AR being his endgame. The Vision Pro is just a way to reach augmented reality glasses, as are smartglasses. Apple is just finding the best way to get there.

So, no, XR is not dead today, and Apple has not abandoned XR. It is just finding a way to get out of the quicksand and make XR succeed, like all other companies.

I hope you liked this editorial, and if this is the case, please share it with your peers to help me keep this independent blog alive! And if you also want to donate some money on Patreon… well, that would be amazing!

(Header image by Apple)

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