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When Apple announced the price of their groundbreaking new mixed reality headset, the Vision Pro, jaws around the world collectively dropped. At a hefty $3,499, it’s not for everyone, but is it really so unreasonable if we take a closer look?
The Vision Pro Really Does Totally New Things
First off, the Apple Vision Pro isn’t just another gadget; it’s an entirely new way of interacting with digital content. It blends the digital and physical worlds, enabling you to navigate digital spaces with your eyes, hands, and voice. While other products have offered some subset of what the Vision Pro promises to do, there is no comparative mixed reality (really, we should say extended reality) product to compare it against directly.
While we’ll have to wait for the device to get into the hands of independent reviewers to learn if the reality (ha!) measures up to Apple’s carefully-curated presentation, assuming it does what it says on the tin, this is a landmark device.
You can point at any number of things that are peerless in the Vision Pro. The micro OLED offers such high pixel density that we expect the pixel grid to be entirely invisible. The R1 spatial processor and complex array of sensors blow everything else we can think of out of the water. The eye-tracking system is practically precognitive.
Yet, it’s not just the objectively novel subcomponents in the Vision Pro that make it something new and special. It’s the sum of those parts held together by the underlying software, the interface design, and its integration into the Apple ecosystem.
Setting aside whether the Vision Pro will do things as well as promised, there is simply no equivalent product that promises to do what the Vision Pro does—just like the first iPhone, which did not have a direct peer as a holistic product
The R&D Costs Were Likely Enormous
The Vision Pro isn’t just an iteration of existing technology; it’s a dramatic leap forward. It represents years of research and development, with a hardware design that is both innovative and complex.
Make no mistake, Apple has been working on the building blocks of this device for a long time. They were acquiring AR startups years ago, and even now, just after the launch announcement of Vision Pro, have made another such purchase.
Apple’s ARKit API in every modern iPhone and iPad paved the way for the Vision Pro to be spatially aware. When ARKit launched as a software solution working with existing iPhone cameras, it made Google hardware-based AR platform “Tango” seem quaint. It wasn’t long before Google killed off that project in favor of ARCore, its own ARKit-like solution.
The big takeaway here is that Apple has to recoup some of the R&D costs from the first generation of their product, and because it contains so much new and cutting-edge technology, we can’t imagine that the cost of each unit is particularly low.
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