Apple Discontinues Flagship Device Due to Low Sales

Apple Discontinues Vision Pro Headset: Apple has made a tactical decision to retreat from augmented and virtual reality, scaling back production of its $3,500 Vision Pro headset.

An employee at Chinese manufacturer Luxshare, which has a contract to do final assembly of the Vision Pro, revealed that the tech giant has informed them that manufacturing of the product may need to be “finished” by the end of November.

Apple Discontinues Vision Pro Headset

Luxshare, according to this source, has already cut assembly rates in half: assembling around 1,000 Vision Pro units/day, down from a maximum of 2,000 units/day.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, however, said that the $3,500 AR-goggles simply are ‘not a mass-market product.’ 

‘Right now, it’s an early-adopter product,’ Cook said late last month, in a sprawling interview. 

‘People who want to have tomorrow’s technology today—that’s who it’s for. Fortunately, there’s enough people who are in that camp that it’s exciting.’

Note that Facebook’s parent company Meta sold roughly six million Quest 2 headsets and about three million of its next-gen Quest 3s in the first three quarters after they were first introduced, according to Counterpoint.

Meta’s Quest 3 costs $500, thousands less that the Vision Pro.

‘Obviously I’d like to sell more,’ Cook told the Wall Street Journal in October.

‘I’d always like to sell more of everything,’ he explained, ‘because ultimately, we want our products to be in as many people’s hands as possible.’ 

Cook, who also said he uses the futuristic Vision Pro everyday, described the device’s launch as a success simply by getting a first product to market that software developers and app makers can now work with to make new products.

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Apple To Work On More Affordable Products

The retreat was first reported this June by The Information, who learned that Apple was pivoting to work on a more affordable Vision goggles product with fewer features, hoping to release this budget model sometime before the end of 2025.

Development on a true second generation version of the higher-end headset, tentatively titled the Vision Pro 2, had been suspended, the tech news site reported.

Elsewhere in Apple’s supply chain for the Vision Pro, some factory employees have reported that manufacture of the device’s internal components had already halted back in May.

Anonymous sources at three suppliers working within Apple’s pipeline have currently built enough parts to make between 500,000 and 600,000 Vision Pro headsets.

Apple had previously told one of its suppliers to anticipate a production load of components needed for approximately 8 million Vision Pros over the device’s entire lifespan, according to The Information.

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