On Friday, the Vision Pro, Apple’s mixed reality headset, will be on sale in other nations outside of the United States.
The headset is now available for purchase in Australia as of Friday morning. At the opening of stores, the Vision Pro will also be available in Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
This comes after the headgear made its debut on June 28 in Asian markets, including China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore.
Customers reserved times for Vision Pro demos at one of Apple’s biggest stores in London, located on Regent Street. The Vision Pro is a new product with a high price tag, even though Apple has long allowed prospective buyers to test other devices in-store.
Employees at Apple cheered customers who came in to test the headset when the store opened at 8 a.m. local time.
One of the busiest retail districts in London, Regent Street, is home to the Apple Store, and Liam Nicholson was the first person inside. He scheduled a time in advance to pick up his Vision Pro.
“So I tried it on at a conference and just felt like I was still in the room. And then someone pulled up a dinosaur demo, the dinosaur comes out to bite your hand and it felt like it was really there. So the clarity of it compared to what I’ve seen with other aspects is amazing.”
People can usually easily pre-order well-known hardware, like iPhones, online without much fanfare or in-person testing. However, Apple has an opportunity to persuade consumers to spend $3,499 on its headset—much more than rival mass-market headsets—with the help of the Vision Pro demos. The Vision Pro is priced at £3,499 in the UK.
According to Nicholson, the way the device integrates into the larger Apple lineup makes the premium price tag justified.
“I think as all the apps come on board and things like that, that’s the thing that’s probably really worth it. Like I’ve got an iPhone, got a [Apple] Watch, having it all fit is definitely worth it,” he said.
Given that the Vision Pro is “a relatively new product category that is far from mainstream,” Bryan Ma, vice president of International Data Corporation, stated there is no denying the intense enthusiasm surrounding the device. Furthermore, it is a product “coming from Apple, whose implementation is far ahead of the competition.”
The question, according to Ma, is whether Apple can turn the initial weeks of excitement into long-term sales.
“That will be difficult given not only the currently sky-high price tag, but also the fact that the ecosystem of applications and use cases is still evolving,” Ma stated via email.
According to an IDC assessment released on June 18, Meta continued to hold the top spot in the mixed/virtual reality headset market in the first quarter, while Apple rose to the second spot as a result of its recent arrival. Xreal, HTC, and ByteDance were also among the top five.
“Both Meta’s Quest 3 and the Vision Pro helped educate users and enticed developers to create mixed reality content, blending the digital and physical worlds,” according to IDC.
IDC went on, “Unfortunately, this has come at a premium for users,” alluding to the expensive price points.
Ming-Chi Kuo, an Apple analyst at TF International Securities, claims that Apple reduced its Vision Pro sales projections from 700,000 to 800,000 units in 2024 to approximately 400,000 to 450,000 units. Kuo ascribed the reduced shipment projection to a decrease in demand.
“We’re expecting Apple to ship about 400,000 units this year, almost half of which will be outside of the U.S. That compares to a total market of 7.3 million units. This can ramp up more quickly if we start to see hardware prices come down and utility from the applications increase,” according to Ma.
