Apple Vision Pro cuts production after weak sales. What now with AR/VR?

The new year hasn’t even started yet, and we already have a strong contender for our annual dead tech list, the 2026 edition – the Apple Vision Pro.

Not that the iPhone maker’s Augmented Reality (AR) headset is over, of course. The Apple Vision Pro (starting at $3,499) has been, to paraphrase Monty Python, a rather relaxing production from its Chinese manufacturer, Luxcorp. That’s according to analysts at International Data Corp, who estimate that Apple sold only 4,500 headsets worldwide in the holiday quarter of 2025 – the new version of the M5 chip (reportedly made in Vietnam) included.

By comparison, that’s less than one-tenth of the million Vision Pros analysts say will be sold by its launch year, 2024.

Apple isn’t releasing sales figures for the Vision Pro — but the company has cut back on marketing the product, according to a hard-hitting report. Financial Times report. Digital marketing for the device has been reduced by 95 percent. If you see a Vision Pro banner ad on the Internet, you might want to take a screenshot: You’re looking at an endangered species.

What went wrong with Apple Vision Pro?

To be fair to Apple, declining sales are a problem for the entire AR/virtual space – let alone the entire US retail space.

Counterpoint analysts see a 14 percent decline in all sales of AR/VR earphones in the first quarter of 2025. The Vision Pro is clearly at the lower end of the market — Meta’s Quest 3S VR headset recently dropped its price to $250 — and luxury items are often the first to go when consumers hear prices like health comforts and health costs. premiums.

Even if you’re fixated on the idea of ​​AR headsets with attached battery packs, you might be very tempted to drop half the Vision Pro’s price tag on the new Galaxy XR headset ($1,800). As fun as Vision Pro can be, there is no “killer app” identified in this forum. The iPhone is an important status symbol; iPad helps you live a better creative life; your Mac is your workhorse; and VisionPro … what exactly does it do?

From the start, the company has struggled to explain why we should want the Vision Pro (as surprisingly Black Mirror-esque product demo shown). So it makes sense to park those dollars, at least. For those of us who find Vision Pro’s EyeSight appalling, banners featuring the feature can do it Underneath it is possible to buy one.

Apple’s AI glasses are the future.

Disappointing sales and halted production don’t mean Apple doesn’t know what to do in this category. On the contrary, according to one well-available report of Oct. 2025 – the company is already phasing out its cheaper Vision Pro version, and moving on to a simpler, cheaper model of smart glasses that will compete with Meta’s AI-powered Ray-Ban Display and Google’s upcoming Android XR glasses.

That makes a lot of sense. Despite Mark Zuckerberg’s agonizing demo failure, the $800 Meta Ray-Bans are shaping up to be one of the most exciting products to launch in 2025. Early adopters and critics alike were optimistic, and investors clamored to buy shares in the company that made Ray-Bans.

With live rendering, directions, and smart specs, Meta Ray-Bans fulfills many of the augmented reality promises we’ve had since Google Glass (which also took a long time to officially die); and they happen to be Ray-Bans and that way they don’t make you look like a nerd. (Well, unless you’re indoors and cool shades are easy to reveal, unfortunately, on thick frames.)

If there’s one company that understands the importance of design that appeals to non-nerdy customers, it’s Apple. So while the big, expensive, smart Vision Pro may be walking dead technology, don’t count out its maker just yet. Apple may come back from this sales slump to surprise us with something like the Vision Air – lightweight specs that serve more than 45,000 new customers each quarter.