This is surprising. From everything I've been hearing in the media, I got the impression Apple had mostly given up on their XR products and will keep them on life-support until the technology is ready for mass consumption.
The media loves to spin Apple things as failures right up until the point when they’re a success. See coverage of iPhone, Apple Pay, iPad, etc. Even “Apple faithful” media like MacRumors.com will be measured but pessimistic about Apple’s new efforts because negativity drives clicks more than positivity across the board.
I don't think this is an Apple-exclusive phenomenon. Even if it was, the media would be pretty well-justified in reporting on a lifestyle product with diminished demand. I remember similar news coverage for the PS3, Shamwow, Google Glass, Juicero, Zune, Fire Phone, and so much more.
It feels more like Apple users aren't used to acknowledging Apple's own failures. Because Apple refuses to admit certain products don't succeed (see: iPhone Mini, 12" Macbook, Butterfly Keyboard), their users come to believe that Apple is beyond reproach. If Vision Pro was good enough for the public, it's genuinely hard to imagine how much worse the Apple Car and Airpower could be.
Agree this isn’t Apple exclusive. Mostly what I mean to say is that media tends to portray things as DOOMED if they aren’t amazingly successful right out of the gate. The Vision Pro v1 is not a great product but it’s also a super niche product given the price so expectations of 20M units are far fetched to begin with. It’s more of a Mac Pro tier product than a MacBook Pro 16 or a MacBook Air product, much less an iPad or iPhone type product in terms of addressed market. But I don’t think this means the product is an abject failure that should be cancelled and written off as a sunk cost / dead end.
Apple sold ~17M iPhones in its first 2 years, ~20M Apple Watches in the same timeframe, and ~370K Vision Pros in its first year from a production run of ~500K. No further Vision Pro v1 production is planned, with remaining units allocated for second-year (2025) demand.
Vision Pro is an absolute flop compared to even the "everyone said it would fail the first year" products that went on to success. 500K units across 2 years when the presumed Watch sold 20M in the same timeframe and fanboys are still telling us "you're saying the same thing about AVP as you did iPhone and Watch when they first came out." Maybe so, but Vision Pro is orders of magnitude worse off out of the gate than those other products and Apple's already moved the top AVP talent to Siri, spectacles, and other projects so it's pretty clear Apple agrees it's not going to be a success.
They've mostly given up on the goggles form factor, though the winding down will probably be over the next couple of years. That technology will never be ready so they're moving on to entirely new technologies for far less capable spectacles that will be more like Apple Watch for your eyes, a heads up display much like your car's.
Those who know can't say, and those who say don't know. This isn't universally true, but accurate info from Apple is hard to come by, and it gets harder the farther out you're looking. People outside Apple, and most people inside Apple, don't know where things stand with the Vision product line.
