The Wall Street Journal ran a profile of Tim Cook, and it includes quotes of Cook's take on Apple Vision Pro's level of success.
The piece covers Cook's life and career to date, and if you're interested in that you should go read it. But what stood out to us was the section where Cook is asked about Apple Vision Pro.
Here's the full section from the article, with Cook's words in quote marks and the WSJ writer's words not:
When the Vision Pro came out this year, mixed reality crashed into the reality that most consumers aren’t ready to shell out $3,500 for a cool toy.
“Over time, everything gets better, and it too will have its course of getting better and better,” Cook says. “I think it’s just arguably a success today from an ecosystem-being-built-out point of view.”
And from a sales point of view?
“I’d always like to sell more of everything, because ultimately, we want our products to be in as many people’s hands as possible,” he says. “And so obviously I’d like to sell more.” But there’s a limit to the number of faces this version of the Vision Pro will be on. “At $3,500, it’s not a mass-market product,” Cook says. “Right now, it’s an early-adopter product. 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.”
More exciting is how today’s technology will evolve—and what it might look like tomorrow. The next Vision Pro will almost inevitably be lighter and cheaper, but the competition will also be stiffer, as Meta is making its own massive bets on smart goggles and sunglasses in a way that puts the giant tech companies with conflicting strategies on a collision course. Then again, Apple has a history of turning uncertainty into ubiquity. If you doubt the Vision Pro, you might be right. Or you might be as wrong as the skeptics who dismissed iPods and iPhones and AirPods. And from the success of the company’s iconic products, Cook learned one more thing.
“It doesn’t occur overnight,” he says. “None of these did.”
Apple Vision Pro has now been on the market for almost nine months. There's no direct evidence for how well the headset has sold, but as Cook's new comments suggest, at $3500 it was clearly never intended to be a mass-market product.
Cook's sentiment isn't new, either. "You're going to live in the future, and you're going to do it today", was how he pitched Apple Vision Pro on Good Morning America the day after it was announced.
David Heaney
Apple recently released visionOS 2, bringing significant improvements and new features to Vision Pro's operating system. And the company reportedly plans a $2000 non-Pro Vision headset for next year, as well as a Vision Pro refresh with the M5 chip for 2026.
