◎ Editor|Digital Economy Pioneer
Recently, Apple officially announced the official opening of the Apple Vision Pro reservation channel, with a starting price of 3499 US dollars, equivalent to about 25,000 yuan.
According to media reports, the booking server for the Vision Pro was once crowded, and the first batch of products was sold out in only 18 minutes, and the delivery date has been scheduled for mid-to-late March or even April. As a result, some domestic scalpers have speculated the price of the first batch of Vision Pro to a high price of nearly 100,000 yuan.
PART.01
Vision Pro好在哪里？
According to Apple's official website, there are currently three storage versions of Vision Pro: 256GB, 512GB and 1TB, with a starting price of $3499, about 25,000 yuan, and the top version is about 28,000 yuan, and the battery can be purchased separately, which is about 1,430 yuan.
If you are a myopia user, you need to buy Zeiss myopia lenses, the price of myopia lenses is 1070 yuan, and the price of farsighted lenses is 710 yuan.
Vision Pro is the product with the largest upfront development investment and the longest cycle in Apple's entire history. As the most important innovation of the Cook era, the Vision Pro, which has been secretly developed for seven years, has its own unique advantages.
In terms of appearance, the Vision Pro is designed with an aluminum alloy frame and laminated glass, and is equipped with two 4K resolution micro OLED displays, with a total of up to 23 million pixels, and the display effect is very good. In addition, more than a dozen cameras on the headset can perform a variety of actions, including tracking eye movements, recording control gestures, mapping the area around the wearer, and more.
For the user's comfort and wear, the Vision Pro comes with a soft, snug-fitting Light Seal eye shield that attaches magnetically to the frame and comes with two straps, including a single-loop knit strap and a double-buckled strap. The Vision Pro is also available in up to 28 different sizes of "gaskets" and is equipped with three different lengths of straps to ensure that the user is not disturbed by ambient light. After wearing the Apple Vision Pro, the user still sees the real picture, while the people around them can see the wearer's eye expression.
In terms of interactive experience, Apple Vision Pro is equipped with 12 cameras, 5 sensors (1 Lidar, 2 structured light depth sensing, 2 IR sensing) and 6 microphones to achieve a good interactive experience. Instead of an external input device such as a joystick, the Vision Pro navigates the cursor by tracking eye movements and interacts with fingertip pinching. Users can look at an icon and pinch their fingertips to enter the app, or they can pinch their fingers to zoom in and out of the window with a "drag" gesture. Vision Pro can also be used to achieve interactive voice control through Siri, that is to say, Vision Pro can achieve almost all operations through hands + eyes + mouth.
Back to the main interface of Vision Pro, you can see three options: App, People, and Environments, App is the app, and "People" is the contact. Users can choose from a variety of apps available and communicate with others on video, while also changing the virtual background and fully immersing themselves in the VR virtual environment under different wallpapers.
In terms of performance, the Vision Pro is powered by an M2 chip with an 8-core CPU and a 10-core GPU, which is paired with a secondary R1 chip to process incoming information from the camera, sensors, and microphones. With the included external battery pack, the Vision Pro has a battery life of up to 2.5 hours and uses a new operating system called VisionOS. A variety of productivity and creativity apps will be compatible with Vision Pro, including Microsoft's Office suite and Salesforce's Slack.
If the wearer needs to work, not only can they enjoy a large workspace, but they can also drag the application interface in the MacBook directly into the world of the headset, allowing the wearer to create a variety of virtual work environments of their choice on the desk for an immersive office experience.
In addition, Apple has set up 4 cameras inside the Vision Pro to achieve extremely accurate tracking results, which has been well received by many experiencers. Vision Pro also has a unique "3D display" function, through which users can see three-dimensional pictures and experience the 3D movie presented by the space giant screen, the effect is not inferior to the cinema, and the look and feel is more immersive. With the iPhone 15 Pro series, it is already capable of shooting spatial videos.
On the whole, Apple's Vision pro has some special advantages that distinguish it from other types of VR and AR devices on the market. But similar flaws cannot be avoided by Vision pro.
PART.02
Vision Pro的重要缺陷
Although the Apple Vision Pro has received positive reviews in terms of interactive experience and screen performance, it has also exposed some flaws that cannot be ignored in actual use. First of all, the weight issue has become the focus of general complaints from users and reviewers. According to the information, the weight of the Vision Pro is between 600g-650g, which is equivalent to 3 iPhone 15 Pro Max hanging on the head, which is undoubtedly a burden to wear for a long time, which seriously affects the comfort and portability of the product. In addition, the weight of the external battery reaches 353g, which further aggravates the discomfort of wearing.
The high price is another big drawback of the Vision Pro. The 256GB version starts at $3,499, which is about 25,000 yuan, and the top-of-the-line version is about 28,000 yuan. The cost of repairs is also staggering, with repairs costing up to US$799 (about 5,747 RMB) if the exterior glass is broken, and up to US$2,399 (about 17,257 RMB) if the internal lenses or motherboard fail. After purchasing the top-of-the-line 1TB version of the Vision Pro and accessories, AppleCare+, the price will reach $4,795.95, or about 34,500 yuan, which is undoubtedly too expensive for most consumers.
In terms of application ecology, at present, the product only supports English display and input, and can only log in to the Apple ID in the United States, and the official service is limited to the United States, which has a high threshold for use, which has caused inconvenience to users. In addition, due to the delicate relationship between Apple and various developers, as well as dissatisfaction with the App Store policy, developers are much less enthusiastic about the Vision Pro than expected. According to Bloomberg, about 230 visionOS-native apps are currently ready for sale, and some well-known developers such as Netflix, YouTube, and Spotify have made it clear that they will not launch dedicated software for visionOS.
While Apple claims that the Vision Pro will have more than a million apps available at launch, including software from companies like Disney, TikTok, Amazon, and Paramount, most of them are likely direct portes of the iPad version, not entirely new apps designed specifically for visionOS.
The application scenarios that Apple is betting on are 3D image shooting and browsing, film and television entertainment, and work, but the advantages compared to traditional displays are not obvious. In terms of game scenes, Apple seems to have deliberately ignored the games that mainstream VR devices will focus on. Although there are games on the Vision Pro, they are only flat windows hanging in the air, and the interactive devices are also limited to traditional gamepads. As for somatosensory interactive games that can give full play to the characteristics of VR equipment, Vision Pro does not support it at present, and there is no sign of support.
To sum up, although Apple's Vision Pro performs well in terms of interactive experience and immersion, the shortcomings in weight, price, application ecology, and game support limit the competitiveness and user experience of the product, making the market prospect of the product face many challenges. As a result, many organizations predict that Vision Pro's shipments this year will not be too high.
PART.03
Huge stakes
Market research agencies have previously estimated that the Apple Vision Pro's cold start may be relatively slow. Although bookings were hot, about 80,000 units were sold within the first hour. However, analysts do not expect the Vision Pro to end up selling too much in 2024, with total shipments likely to be between 300,000 and 400,000 units. It only brings in $1.4 billion in revenue for Apple. Compared to Apple's annual revenue of nearly $400 billion, this figure is insignificant.
But for Apple, opportunities are far more important than temporary revenue. The iPhone, for example, only brought $1 billion in revenue to Apple in its first year of release, but that number became $5.2 billion the following year, followed by $18.6 billion. Apple CEO Tim Cook sees the Vision Pro as a revolutionary spatial computing device. "In the same way that the Mac has exposed us to the personal computer and the iPhone has exposed us to mobile computing, the Vision Pro will introduce us to spatial computing, which marks the beginning of a mileage. "The Vision Pro carries Apple's ambitions, and it's a huge bet on whether it can be the 'next iPhone'.
Meta's practice in the past few years has proved that VR headsets may not have the ideal growth potential. Before Facebook officially changed its name to Meta, its Reality Lab had an annual revenue of $1.39 billion. After a year of huge investment, this figure grew by only 3% in 2022 to $1.43 billion. By 2023, this figure will shrink by 40% year-on-year, recording only $830 million (including software and hardware revenue).
Meta's performance is actually a microcosm of the entire XR hardware market. In 2023, the size of the VR and AR hardware market in the United States will fall by 40% to only $660 million. The Apple Vision Pro, which is currently only available in the United States, will directly change the market landscape if it successfully achieves its sales target of $1.4 billion in the first year.
But that's just the beginning, and for Apple, VR is a track with a long history and a lack of rivals. No one knows what the "critical mass" of the fission development of the detonation industry is and where the detonation switch is. What Apple wants to challenge is the fate of the entire industry. From the Apple II to the Macintosh, from the iPod to the iPhone, the Apple Watch and the AirPods, every revolutionary product definition of Apple is to turn what others have tried and thought was impossible.
According to industry sources, Apple is looking to expand sales of the Vision Pro beyond the U.S. ahead of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) this summer, with countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada and China likely to be available next.
According to Cook, "in the next 10 years, devices like the Vision Pro will replace smartphones." "Vision Pro is a window from 2D to the 3D world, from the system, software to the hardware layer, the amount of innovation is far more than most people think, and the significance of how Apple defines the next generation of products may be greater than the number of units sold.
Apple wants to change much more than VR. And the process of changing this will be a long time.
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