Apple launched its Vision Pro headset at its annual WWDC event on Monday, ending months of speculation that the Cupertino tech giant was getting ready to launch its own VR or augmented reality product.
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Apple’s Vision Pro will launch in the U.S. on February 2, the company said in a press release Monday, with pre-orders beginning January 19.
Pre-orders will open at 5 PM Pacific Time on the 19th, according to the Vision Pro’s product page.
The company also said that prescription lens inserts for the Vision Pro would cost $149, and that the headset would have 256 GB of storage.
Apple shares rose three-quarters of a percent in pre-market trading Monday.
The $3,500 headset is Apple’s answer to Meta’s Quest headsets, and has reportedly been in development for years. Apple announced the product at its Worldwide Developers Conference in 2023.
“The era of spatial computing has arrived,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in Monday’s release. The headset is powered by Apple’s M2 chip, the same one used in its computers.
The Vision Pro is Apple’s first new product category since the Apple Watch launched in 2015. Analysts and experts do not expect the headset to drive significant revenue initially. UBS, for example, anticipates that Vision Pro revenue could be around $1.4 billion, a “relatively immaterial” amount.
Many companies have made a virtual reality push in the past, but so far, those efforts haven’t led to widespread adoption for consumers or enterprise customers.
The Vision Pro boasts a new operating system, dubbed visionOS, alongside an input system that allows customers to use their eyes, hands and voice to control the headset. Apple says that a number of productivity and creativity apps will work with Vision Pro, including Microsoft’s Office suite and Salesforce’s Slack.
With the new headset, Apple aims to change how consumers experience gaming and video content. Users will be able to watch video from Apple TV+ and numerous other platforms on a virtual-reality screen “that feels 100 feet wide,” the company wrote in the release.
