Apple expands Vision Pro to more countries outside the U.S.

Apple’s mixed reality headset, the Vision Pro, will grow to be available in additional countries outside of the U.S. on Friday.

Customers in Australia are already capable of purchase the headset as of Friday morning. The Vision Pro will even hit the shelves in Canada, France, Germany and the U.K. when stores open.

This comes after the headset’s debut in Asian markets – China, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore – on June 28.

At considered one of Apple’s largest stores in London on Regent Street, customers booked slots for demos with the Vision Pro. While Apple has long allowed potential customers to check other gadgets in store, the Vision Pro is a recent product with a hefty price tag.

For established hardware like iPhones, typically people can just pre-order online without the fanfare or hands-on testing. However the Vision Pro demos offer Apple a probability to persuade people why they need to drop $3,499 for its headset — far pricier than other mass-market headsets.

Bryan Ma, vp of International Data Corporation, said there is not any doubt that there is huge excitement for the Vision Pro because it is “a comparatively recent product category that’s removed from mainstream.” Besides, it’s also a product “coming from Apple, whose implementation is way ahead of the competition.”

Nonetheless, the challenge is whether or not Apple can sustain the initial weeks of pleasure and convert that into sustainable sales, Ma said.

“That might be difficult given not only the currently sky-high price tag, but additionally the incontrovertible fact that the ecosystem of applications and use cases continues to be evolving,” Ma said in emailed comments.

In the primary quarter, Meta maintained its top position within the mixed/virtual reality headset market, while Apple’s recent entry propelled it to No. 2, in accordance with an IDC report published on June 18. ByteDance, Xreal, and HTC were also in the highest five.

“Each Meta’s Quest 3 and the Vision Pro helped educate users and enticed developers to create mixed reality content, mixing the digital and physical worlds,” said IDC.

“Unfortunately, this has come at a premium for users,” IDC added, referring to the high price points.

Apple reportedly trimmed its Vision Pro sales expectations to around 400,000 to 450,000 units in 2024, down from 700,000 to 800,000 earlier, in accordance with Ming-Chi Kuo, an Apple analyst at TF International Securities. Kuo attributed the lower shipment forecast to declining demand.

“We’re expecting Apple to ship about 400,000 units this yr, almost half of which might be outside of the U.S. That compares to a complete market of seven.3 million units. This will ramp up more quickly if we begin to see hardware prices come down and utility from the applications increase,” said Ma.

– CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.