We love CAD on Apple Vision Pro. We saw it being used for CAD at Shapr3D’s Vision Pro event. The 4K resolution per eye will take your breath away. However, there may need to be more of us. Apple has sensed the soft demand and has reduced production of the Vision Pro, according to The Information.
Apple launched Vision Pro with great fanfare in June of 2023. Suppliers have produced components for 500,000 to 600,000 Vision Pro units, but production was halted in May. Apple has also informed assembler Luxshare to potentially stop manufacturing in November.
The device’s cost, about $3,500, is said to be the biggest factor. Apple still has not officially commented on the production stop. The company had been planning to release a less expensive Vision product with fewer features by the end of 2025. That would have helped it better compete with Meta’s $500 headset. It is not known what the less expensive Apple headset will cost, and with this news, we wonder if the lesser model will come to be.
It’s a setback for the high-end AR/VR/XR market, which Apple was trying to take over with the Vision Pro. Indeed, Apple has a way of taking over markets, as it did with the iPod (music devices), iPhone (smartphones), iPad (tablets) and the Apple Watch. Under Steve Jobs, Apple put design first and an emphasis on quality to acquire such a cachet that they were able to charge extraordinary premiums. iPhones, for example, sell for 25% more than Android phones on average.
With a string of product successes under Jobs, you could bet on Apple to create the next big thing, the sensational new product. The lack of success with the Vision Pro breaks the string.
At the September 2024 Apple Event, CEO Tim Cook committed to AI. In April 2024, Apple scrapped plans for an iCar (our name for Apple’s Project Titan). To the Apple-faithful, the iCar would have been the next Big thing.
The Vision Pro may have its fans among affluent gamers — unless that is a contradiction in terms. Outside of conferences and user events, such as Shapr3D’s Vision Pro announcement, the Vision Pro was rarely seen or heard of. I’ve only seen one Vision Pro in the wild, and that was on a passenger on a flight to San Francisco.
Shapr3D remains the only CAD company to have shown interest in Apple’s Vision Pro. It may have been love at first sight for István Csanády, who recognized it as an AR/VR headset without equal. With the Vision Pro, he was all in. Had the Vision Pro taken off, Shapr3D would have had first mover advantage, just as it did when it was first introduced to us, the first serious MCAD program running on Apple’s iPad.
