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Apple Gives Up On the Vision Pro After M5 Refresh Flop (macrumors.com) 54

Posted by BeauHD from the they-can't-all-be-a-hit dept.
MacRumors reports that Apple has effectively paused work on Vision Pro after the M5 refresh failed to revive demand. The team has reportedly been reassigned and the company is now shifting focus toward smart glasses instead. From the report: The Vision Pro has been criticized for its high price tag and its uncomfortable weight. The device is over 1.3 pounds, and even with the more comfortable Dual Knit Band that Apple added to redistribute weight, it continues to be hard to wear for long periods of time. The M5 chip added a 120Hz refresh rate, 10 percent more rendered pixels, and around 30 additional minutes of battery life, but the price tag stayed at $3,499, and it ended up not selling well. The Vision Pro has been unpopular since it first launched, and Apple only sold around 600,000 units in total. Insider sources told MacRumors that Apple has received an unusually high percentage of returns, far exceeding any other modern Apple product.

[...] If Apple finds a way to create a much cheaper, more comfortable VR headset in the future, the Vision Pro line could be revived, but right now, the company has no plans to launch a new model. Apple has not discontinued the Vision Pro and is continuing to sell the M5 model. Instead of continuing to experiment with virtual reality, Apple is working on smart glasses that will eventually incorporate augmented reality capabilities, but the first version will be similar to the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses with AI and no integrated display.

Apple Gives Up On the Vision Pro After M5 Refresh Flop More | Reply

Apple Gives Up On the Vision Pro After M5 Refresh Flop

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  • Sell it for $350... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by fropenn ( 1116699 )
    ...and I'll try one. It's mostly a gimmick, not a must-have, and for that price tag it's no surprise they aren't selling more of them. For that much money, I could buy like 8 huge-screen TVs and cover the wall, and even buy a dedicated a computer to scale images to that size. And still have plenty of cash left over.

    Wanna sell more? Cut the price.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by CEC-P ( 10248912 )
      Bro, you're talking about Apple cult members that paid like $900 for a monitor STAND. Not the monitor, the stand. They spend their last dollar to inflate their ego and pretend like it's 2006 and Apple is still some prestigious show-off culture brand and everything else was for cave men (which also wasn't true back then, it was just their marketing that low IQ people fell for).
      What they didn't like was strapping a giant device to their head, ruining their makeup, babysitting another battery in their life, h

    • Have you seen the component prices of damn near everything tech related these days? They can't sell it with the current specs for $350. They could sell some stripped-down, kinda-sorta-is-a-VR-headset for $350, but it'd probably offer nothing that you can't already get from a Meta Quest 3S, except an Apple logo.

      I think this is entirely why Apple gave up on the idea. They usually target the "premium" segment of a market (the Neo being a recent notable exception), and for VR headsets the math just ain't mat

      • The neo isn't an exception there. It's targeting the chromebook market, prices ranging from 99 to 399 mostly so sitting at 599 is at the upper end. It offers a slightly premium build but isn't straying too far into excessive BOM cost. A last gen phone SOC, a last-decade amount of RAM/SSD (seriously i have a 12 year old thinkpad with 8gb and 256 ssd), sRGB ips display with no custom panel cuts, etc. The BOM cost for the Neo isn't even 300, but is sold for 600/700.

        • The neo isn't an exception there. It's targeting the chromebook market, ...

          Not really. The Neo is targeting buyers for K-12 school districts. Who have tried both iPad and Chromebook and have been disappointed. At the new price point returning to familiar Mac computers is something they will take a hard look at.

          Yes they will sell to some potential Chromebook users but this is incidental. Apple avoids commodity markets.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Hadlock ( 143607 )

          They can sell the neo at a loss because parents will buy a kid a laptop even before they buy them a phone. If you've had an apple laptop for three years, what phone are you going to want? And yeah also it's a very transparent education market play, which again, feeds lifelong customers into their ecosystem.

    • I'm thinking, more like $50.

      To me, it doesn't matter what it costs to make the things. $50 is all it's worth...to me.

    • It's mostly a gimmick

      No, current models are still mostly a testbed, the market mainly developers and perhaps a few niche applications. It's this generation's Apple Newton. A place for Apple and 3rd party engineers to learn and gain experience with the concept, technology, UI, and applications.

    • Exactly. They should also allow a full MacOS to run on it. Even if it just runs as an application. Or better year, the vision OS runs as an application on top of the MacOS. But as is I might even pay the same as iPhone Pro or MacBook Air ($1100). But no way am I dropping $3500 for one.

      They are definitely better than my Quest 3. But $3500 is far too much for something that basically only useful to the majority as a content consumption device.
    • It's been clear for at least a year there was not going to be a true successor to the Vision Pro. The M5 upgrade was a strategy to take all of the parts Apple had sitting in warehouses, throw in a new CPU (which they were already going to make), then sell it as an upgrade to previous buyers. They knew they weren't going to win over new customers (more CPU power was never the problem), they just needed a way to get rid of excess parts inventory. The people on the Vision Pro team moved on long ago.

  • Fascinating how some still believe in VR success (Score:3)

    by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @04:18PM (#66118914)
    There appears to be a small group of people who think that wearing a VR helmet for hours could be fun, and CEOs appear to be over-represented in that small group. Even if the likes of Vision Pro were sold for 35 $, I would still not want to wear one for any extended period of time.

    • It's true, I was around when the initial round of VR came out in the late 90s and they never did get around to solving the "I want to vomit after 15 minutes" problem. The graphics are better and they got rid of the wires, but it's still a fundamentally bad human interface and remains a solution in search of a problem.

      • I get carsick easily and throw up from rollercoasters that my little kids can take. You get sick the first time you do VR, but your brain very quickly acclimates and like by the 4th time I used it I didn't feel VR sick at all. YMMV.

      • They *did* solve it. The oculus DK1 was the proof. The thesis was that you just needed low input latency, head tracking, and wide stereo vision. I've spent entire workdays in VR and never get an iota of sick.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AuMatar ( 183847 )

          I get sick after 10 minutes last time I tried it (a few years ago). It's not anywhere near solved. Of course I have no desire to try the new versions, because even if it was solved it doesn't actually make anything useful better.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 0123456 ( 636235 )

        I never had a problem with motion sickness in 90s VR, even with those glorious maybe-15fps graphics. I do sometimes feel it with modern VR, but I just avoid those few games that trigger it (e.g. Half-Life VR is particularly bad for me but I don't know why as it doesn't seem much different to other games I can play for hours).

        Most of the motion sickness triggers were debugged and solved years ago so app developers should know how to avoid them.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Hadlock ( 143607 )

        The disorientation goes away for most people after ~1-2 weeks, but yeah, you have to be really committed to the product. I am very resistant to motion sickness but I recall a couple times in the first month where I was in some ultralight airplane sim (like pilotwings type thing) and looking down while banking sharply and almost threw up.

        Mass consumer VR is a fucking dumb idea though, I'm stunned apple was still shipping hardware updates, they must have contracted for a million of the displays or som

    • There are still people who think all other people mind wearing a VR helmet for hours because they mind it. There are a lot of people who don't mind.. but they do mind spending toward $4000 to have great visuals... And yes not everybody wants it, but there are also many who don't want to play golf or american footbal or baseball or surf or ride motorcycles or play tennis..... It's not for everybody like so many other things..

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by znrt ( 2424692 )

        There are a lot of people who don't mind.. but they do mind spending toward $4000 to have great visuals

        i don't mind and i have spent that and then some, for years, just not on an overhyped luxury gadget but on the box to run any of the existing well performing and competitively priced vr headsets.

        there's another group of people that doesn't mind and it's clearly, sorry to say, apple fanbois. apple cashed in big time just for their brand with the first iteration, and could have stopped there. they very likely actually did stop investing at that point as the improvements since have been laughable, they have be

    • Even if the likes of Vision Pro were sold for 35 $, I would still not want to wear one for any extended period of time.

      I think that was also a contributing factor to the demise of 3D television. Any sort of 3D goggles or VR becomes headache inducing for a lot of people after more than a few minutes. It's why I still think the most ideal use of the technology was for theme park attractions, but ironically even there, a few of the major parks have converted the video content of their rides to 2D experiences.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 0123456 ( 636235 )

        3D TV and it just wasn't very good unless you had a huge TV or sat very close to the screen. I watched a few movies on ours but in the end it wasn't worth the hassle.

        The best 3D movie I ever saw was an IMAX 3D demo video in the 90s because the tech was new, they were trying to wow everyone and I was sitting close enough to the screen that I could barely see anything outside the screen, just a little black line around the edge of my field of view. You can't really do that in your living room.

        The second best

        • Nah, the unfixable aspect of 3D glasses/VR goggles is that in the real world, you can decide what you want your eyes to focus on. When you're looking at a simulated 3D image, try as you might, you can't make the background come into focus.

          Of course, the answer to that situation is just "don't do that", but some people can't help it and they try to focus on a blurry part of the simulated 3D image - which remains blurry, and that leads to feelings of disorientation and headaches.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by 0123456 ( 636235 )

            Meta/Oculus were developing a solution to that but it was canned a few years ago because it would have made the headset a lot more expensive. It's not a big issue in most cases because VR apps generally don't try to do depth-of-field effects.

            The simpler solution is eye-tracking to figure out what you're looking at and depth-of-field based on where your eyes are looking, but Meta/Oculus were building something that would adjust the lenses based on where you were looking so you could physically focus near and

    • And it is fun, if you can do fun things with it. Apple offers nothing fun to do while trying to sell a hyper expensive product. In the mean time Meta's products have sold like mad thanks largely to them providing the fun first and the hardware afterwards for cheap.

      But define extended period of time. The things we do in VR should be fun, the act of wearing a headset not. If all you're doing is replacing your computer monitor, you're doing something very wrong. If on the other hand you spend an hour or two ki

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dohzer ( 867770 )

      There appears to be a small group of people who think that wearing a VR helmet for hours could be fun

      I definitely did back when VR had some awesome games out. Half-Life: Alyx, Pavlov VR, etc. I'd play all night without getting tired or motion sick. But my headset only cost $450 and not ten times that price, so... yeah....

  • Oh no! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by kamapuaa ( 555446 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @04:20PM (#66118920) Homepage

    I'm sorry to hear it, as the Oculus/Meta Quest is one of those few technologies that makes you think "holy shit!" It really is an amazing experience, it feels like living in Science Fiction. Then the best actual use is playing Resident Evil 4, a Gamecube game from 2005. I also enjoy taking 360 videos.

    I thought Apple would be able to take this amazing technology and find some practical application for it...and I see I was wrong! I still think it can happen someday.

    • At the end of the day though, it's still just an extremely expensive toy.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 0123456 ( 636235 )

        Maybe. I think I've spent around $3k on my VR headsets over the last decade and played over a thousand hours of VR in Skyrim alone.

        So if you're actually going to use it, it's pretty cheap in terms of cost per hour. If you're going to play a few demos and then put the $500 headset on a shelf, yeah.

        • If you're going to play a few demos and then put the $500 headset on a shelf, yeah.

          Friend of mine did that. Bought an Oculus to play around with, got bored with it and now it collects dust. I briefly tried it while visiting him one time and was like "this is neat, but maybe for 15 minutes at a time." I'm one of those unlucky people where 3D starts to give me a headache after more than a few minutes. Found that out the first time I tried watching a feature length 3D film.

    • Viewing movies and series on the big screen or in perfect 3D. Using it for fitness or relaxation exercises, using it for education and even using it for multimonitor (remote) working. But the Pro is just too expensive. They should have ditched the frontscreen when they refreshed it and with that drop the price a bit (it would probably still be $3000+, meta had tested it in their labs and came yo the conclusion it didn't really add anything except extra cost.
    • I use my quest3 as a 10' 4k monitor that I can use out on the deck. It's not perfect, but it's very usable. I was hoping apple would hit this out of the park, but nope.
    • Agree I loved my Oculus VR back in the day. I imagine soon enough AI will advance to the point they can create a true "Holodeck" type app where you just describe environment you want to be in and it generates it on the fly. I'll buy another one the day they do.
  • Nobody wants that thing hanging off their face, especially when they can get a quest for 1/7th the cost without the power brick. I thought apple was supposed to understand product design.

  • Why would a faster CPU revive demand? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @04:56PM (#66118996) Homepage Journal

    I'm really not sure why they bothered to rev the CPU. Nobody who used one complained that it was too slow. What we complained about was:

    • Apple sold it as a "spatial computer", but did not make it possible to run Mac apps on it.
    • The keyboard is bordering on unusable for any significant amount of typing, and if you're going to be tethered to a keyboard and a desk, you might as well just use your Mac.
    • Apple didn't provide adequate support to guarantee that iOS apps "just work", and instead gave app developers the ability to make their iOS app completely unavailable, and without enough sales volume to warrant the extra effort, a lot of them just turned it off.
    • Apple doesn't support open 3D standards like Vulkan, which makes porting games to these devices a huge pain in the backside, resulting in a dearth of available games.
    • Apple pushed subscription gaming too hard, so for people who don't do enough gaming to justify a subscription or dislike subscribing to software in general, the available game offerings are even sadder.

    Those were the biggest flaws, and two years later, Apple has still done nothing to address literally any of them. Until they do, this product isn't likely to do much in the market, IMO.

    • There was no content, and there were no developers. Apple approached this from the completely wrong point. They sold expensive hardware with little to no use cases, the exact opposite strategy of Steve Job's famous "There' an App for that" presentation.

      Even today the Vision Pro's website has bloody Apple corporate values, followed by accessories like carry cases, before mentioning development right at the bottom. Literally if you print the website the discussion about development and expanding the ecosystem

  • This blows up the business model of the eye surgeon using the Vision Pro for surgeries, reported on Slashdot earlier today.

    • Hopefully they can see their way clear to porting it to a platform where VR isn't a quixotic side-quest for a company with numerous other profitable business units.

      Maybe PICO?

  • There still aren't very many uses for it, and the few specialized uses are not enough to justify the development cost
    Using it as a computer interface by waving your hands is silly
    It might be fun for some games
    It might be useful for scientific or engineering visualization

  • this being a "developer product" to entice devs to create apps specific to the device. If Apple won't itself put in more investment in its future, nor provide an affordable product to reach "network effect" to justify developing for it, why should any devs?

  • From my perspective, it was the difficulty in creating authentic VR environments that held back this technology. But it seems that that issue is about to become a non-issue. AI is on the verge of allowing creation of authentic VR environments by artists, which can jump start the VR arena. I hope Apple reconsiders, or someone else will pick up the torch.
  • This is quite simple. As interest rates rise, companies are less willing to stomach expensive, risky investments. If done right, this could have changed computing....done to displays what headphones did to audio. However, it's very difficult to do at an affordable cost with today's technology. They took a bold risk and now are being more cautious with their money...although in fairness, they didn't really try to hard with this one.

  • People don't wanna pay $3500 to wear a strap-on bowling ball on their face. I don't care how big they told Tim Cook the strap-on market was.

  • I could never figure out any purpose for this or similar devices, nor how to get around the ridiculousness of wearing one (although Apple did make a valiant effort).

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