Elon Musk Tried Out Apple’s Vision Pro
At its developer conference in June, Apple (AAPL) unveiled the Vision Pro, a mixed-reality spatial computing headset — with a $3,500 price tag — that marks Apple’s leap into the virtual reality sector.
The device became available last week, spawning a growing number of videos online of people using the Vision Pro in the wild, some while walking down the street or driving a car.
Wedbush’s Dan Ives said in June that the Vision Pro represents a significant step into artificial intelligence for Apple; he believes the price will drop to $1,500 by 2025, bringing more people on board.
He said in a note that future versions of the Vision Pro will likely be lighter as well as cheaper, two factors that could increase accessibility for a broader audience.
Ives expects Apple will sell 600,000 units of the Vision Pro this year and will sell more than one million units of the device in 2025.
“For Apple, the ultimate goal in our opinion is that Vision Pro will work alongside the iPhone and other Apple devices over the coming years with many consumer AI use cases set to explode across health, fitness, sports content and autonomous,” Ives said.
Among those who have tried out the Vision Pro in these early days of the device’s release is Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, who said Thursday that it “doesn’t feel like it’s there yet.”
“I tried Vision out, but it didn’t blow me away.” iPhone 1 wasn’t great either. Lower utility than alternatives, all things considered, but by iPhone 3 it was unequivocally the best ‘smartphone.’
The Vision Pro is like the iPad:
Musk isn’t the only one who wasn’t blown away by the device.
Deepwater’s Andrew Murphy said in a note Wednesday that “on the spectrum of revolutionary Apple products over the past 25 years, Vision Pro lands somewhere in the middle.”
It’s not like the iPhone, he said, which was immediately useful and compelling. It’s more like the iPad, a device with far less obvious utility.
Murphy expects that revenue from the Vision Pro will be larger than that generated by the Apple Watch, which makes up 5% of Apple’s revenue, and much smaller than the iPhone, which makes up half. He believes the Vision Pro product line over the next decade will be more in line with the iPad, which accounts for around 10% of Apple’s total revenue.
His reasoning is simple: there are a lot of headwinds to the widespread adoption of the device.
The most significant of these headwinds involves the price, weight and battery pack, though he also mentioned the difficulty of using the device while wearing glasses.
“Entertainment can be jaw-dropping in Vision Pro; productivity, however, can be frustrating,” Murphy said.
The other problem Murphy highlighted is one of fierce competition, though not from other VR headsets but from Apple itself.
“I’m still not clear what I’ll be dying to do on Vision Pro instead of another device. Unlike a new iPhone in 2007, those use cases are not immediately obvious to me, nor are they 10x better on Vision Pro,” Murphy, who spent 48 hours testing the device, said. “For quick information, or any use case on the go, my iPhone wins out. For longer sessions of work, my Mac wins out. For exercise, Apple Watch wins out.”
Still, he added that the Vision Pro will likely follow in the footsteps of all of Apple’s previous devices, becoming thinner, lighter and more capable over time, something that will eventually usher in the age of spatial computing.
