Apple has “significantly reduced” its Vision Pro headset production plans, a manufacturing source said in an interview. financial times. The reduction in headset orders has been shown not to be driven by concerns over the high cost of the devices and thus user adoption. Rather, FT sources say the “complexity of headset design and production difficulty” is impacting hardware production targets.
Plans to bring the Vision Pro headset to the general public “early next year” were revealed at WWDC about a month ago. tom’s hardware has been keeping an eye on the show, and our editorial has sparked a lot of discussion among our readers, but mostly about Apple’s potential success in the AR/VR/XR space and its $3,499 product price. was.
Apple usually tracks product availability quickly after product announcements, but the Vision Pro was different. After WWDC, we wondered if there was still a lot left to do, if manufacturing and software development were delaying our launch plans.
On the subject of pinch points affecting launch plans, the FT’s report hits manufacturing fairly squarely. Based on reading the report, which gathered opinions from a number of manufacturing insiders and outside analysts, the big issue probably centers on the manufacturing of his MVision Pro’s micro OLED display. TSMC. Because this state-of-the-art technology component and some others are so new, it is believed that their production processes tend to yield very poorly.
Much of the information revealed in the FT report appears to come from Luxshare, but some is said to have come from Apple sources. Luxshare is a Chinese IT product contract manufacturing company founded from a Shanghai-based AR development team previously owned by his Pegtatron in Taiwan.
The 2024 Apple Vision Pro sales target was originally set at around 1 million units. However, the Cupertino-based company now expects a more modest 400,000 shipments in 2024, according to Apple and Luxshare FT sources. More worrying are the numbers from a secondary supplier (who supplies the Vision Pro components), which apparently receives much smaller orders. Enough to produce 130,000-150,000 units in the first year.
Analysts have made even more mixed predictions for first-year sales of the Apple Vision Pro headset. The FT, citing information from various analyst firms, predicts that Vision Pro sales in the first year will go from his 150,000 units to his 5 million units. Perhaps the most detailed forecast comes from IT-focused analyst firm Canalys. According to the FT, Canalys expects 350,000 headsets to be sold in 2024, increasing to 12.6 million in five years. Additionally, Canalys expects the Apple Vision Pro user base to reach 20 million within five years of its launch.
It’s clear that production will need to scale up significantly over the next few years if Canalys’ estimates are to come to fruition. Luxshare is apparently investing in and building a factory capable of producing nearly 18 million cars a year in the future, he reported to the FT. What’s more, some of the early teething problems we’re seeing could be resolved with the arrival of Apple’s more affordable second-generation headset. According to reports, Apple’s next HMD, for example, he plans to use Samsung / LG displays. These South Korean display makers are already trusted suppliers for many other popular he Apple devices. Once Samsung and LG are ready for Apple headset spec displays, we may see the current production issues resolved and Luxshare’s production facilities completely freed up.
