It’s now been seven months since Apple unveiled its ambitious but pricey Vision Pro headset with a vague release date of early 2024. What that means specifically is still very much up in the air — after all, with the original Apple Watch, the company’s definition of “early 2015” stretched to the end of April.
But it’s looking increasingly likely that consumers eager to don the Vision Pro won’t have to wait anywhere near as long in 2024.
Earlier this month, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman stated that he expected the headset to arrive by the end of February (a revision of an earlier March prediction), and now the analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has chimed in with a similar prediction.
The long-awaited arrival of the Apple Vision Pro
In a post to Medium concerning tech investment trends for 2024, Kuo writes that Vision Pro is already in the mass production stage, and will enter “mass shipments in the first week of January 2024.” That means the headset will “most likely hit the store shelves in late January or early February based on the current mass shipment schedule.”
Said shipments for the year are expected to hit around 500,000 units, Kuo writes — which corroborates a July report claiming that Apple had slashed its original million-strong forecast to a more achievable 400,000.
That still feels optimistic given the sky-high $3,500 MSRP for a luxury headset in a world teetering on recession, but Kuo highlights that strong user feedback could change the mood music in Apple’s favor: It would “help strengthen the market consensus that ‘Vision Pro is the next star product in consumer electronics’ and the related supply chain stock price.”
Elsewhere, Kuo highlights a number of other Apple events including WWDC in June, the iPhone 16 launch in September and a Mac media event in the fourth quarter. The first two feel nailed-on certainties given past schedules, but while a Mac event may happen in Q4, it seems likely that it won’t be the only window for upgrades to the company’s computing range.
After all, the M3 chipset is currently only powering the 24-inch iMac and select MacBook Pros, and you’d imagine the company will spread the chip to other devices including the Mac Studio, Mac Pro, Mac mini and MacBook Air as soon as possible. With summer tipped for the first OLED iPad Pro, WWDC could be a hardware-packed event next year, and is definitely one to keep an eye on.
Looking for a cheaper VR experience? Check out the new Meta Quest 3.
