The Apple Vision Pro is the Tesla Roadster. It will take time for our Model 3 to arrive

Apple usually walks slowly. Don’t get carried away by him hype because he prefers to impose his own. In these years it has not launched folding phones or prepared anything for the metaverse. Even in yesterday’s presentation he did not say the words “Artificial Intelligence” despite the fact that many of his pitches well deserved them.

In return, it only introduces new products when it is already firmly convinced that it has squared the circle, and even if they need improvements, the products keep coming. She now she has started a path that will be much longer than usual.

Not just the battery

The Vision Pro are impressive, but they also have some traces of being a work in progress. Watching a movie, a game or working for a while with those huge virtual screens and the possibilities they bring are fleeting glory, because the “up to two hours” that its battery announces, to make matters worse hanging from a cable, do not allow many experiences to end. At least without interrupting them before changing the battery. It can also be used connected to the current, but greatly limiting mobility or the place where we use them.

Anyway, it will hardly be the battery that deters as many buyers as its price. 3,500 dollars that will have to be seen how it is transferred to euros, but as an advance, the MacBook Pro 16 “M2 Max that costs exactly that amount there is the one that costs 4,200 euros here, so we can find ourselves with a song in the teeth if the conversion does not exceed 4,000 euros.

That price would mark sales that, according to Bloomberg, have been lower than Apple’s previous estimates. From three million to one million… and 900,000 units per year. If it meets them, they are about 3,150 million dollars in billing. At Apple’s usual hardware net margin of around 20%, that would net about $630 million a year. 0.6% of your profit in 2022.

That 0.6% is nothing for a company like Apple. Not for a device that has opened its own division, at least in the categorization of the company’s website. Apple has not wanted to include it as any subsection and these glasses top their own menu.

Apple killed the iPhone mini for having a market share 5% within the iPhone division. What interest can you have in a device that has demanded so many resources for its development and that, given the current figures and those Bloombergwe estimate around 0.6% of your profit?

The answer is in the long run. In a radically different situation for the company, the 1984 Macintosh sold for $2,500 (about $7,600 today). Something within the reach of very few.

Macs dropped in price as scale and technology allowed, and for many moons now, the cheapest Macs (white MacBook, MacBook Air, or Mac mini) can be had for less than four figures.

Something like this is needed in the long term for devices like the Vision Pro to work on a large scale. Like Elon Musk’s plan: build a sports car, use the profits to make a more affordable car, and reuse those new profits to create an even more affordable one. Roadster, Model S, Model 3.

Perhaps the augmented reality glasses of tomorrow require dispensing with somewhat more superfluous components, or by then their components have already become cheaper, the competition has tightened with similar alternatives at reasonable prices, or Apple has achieved a certain scale that allows its prices to be lowered. Or a mix of all of the above. And in this way to be able to start offering augmented reality without implying a price that annuls a large part of its regular clientele.

It is that or, inevitably, leave it for the niche of the niche. This will hardly be of interest to a company that is characterized by having left behind any niche to embrace the global public to continue growing its turnover to the tune of what its shareholders’ meeting demands. But it will hardly happen in a short time.

Featured Image | Manzana.

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