So, where is Apple’s AR/VR headset already?

Rumoured seemingly for ever, Apple’s long-awaited AR/VR headset looks to be finally due in the second half of 2023.

It’s long been mooted that it will be the arrival of an AR/VR headset from Apple that will really kickstart the mass-market to all things virtual. It seems a lot of expectation to place on one company, but Cupertino has changed the game entirely with a selection of new tech introductions (or clever repackaging of existing tech) more than once in its fairly recent history. 

The iPod, the iPhone, the iPad…y’know, it’s good at this sort of thing. And analysts were even pegging back projections surrounding 5G adoption until it started supporting it in its latest phones.

So, for better or worse, for fanbois and haters, the intro of the iHeadest/iGoggles, or whatever, is the big mass market deal that the still nascent AR and VR market is waiting for. And it looks like it is finally coming in 2023. Not the start of it as many hoped, but in the second half at some point.

This is at least according to a Twitter thread from noted analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has delved into the associated supply chain data of the new headset, including the likes of Largan (lens), Genius (pancake), Cowell (camera module), Primax (eyeball tracking module) and so on. He also has a past record at being good at this sort of thing, so it’s worth paying attention.

“My latest survey indicates that the mass shipment schedule of Apple's MR headset may delay to 2H23 because of software-related issues (vs. the previous estimate of 2Q23),” he writes. 

We do know that the operating system that will drive the project has just changed its name from realityOS to xrOS, with the ‘xr’ sobriquet familiar to most people reading this site as standing for ‘extended reality’. We also know that it’s rumoured to be a fairly high end product, more up with the Meta Quest Pro, perhaps, than the Meta Quest 2. So that’s closer to $1499 than $399 in costs terms.

This is perhaps why Kuo is also damping down unit expectations.

“The mass shipment schedule of components is still likely 1H23/2Q23, but due to postponed mass shipment schedule of the end product, Apple MR headset shipment forecast in 2023 will likely be less than 500k units, which is lower than the market consensus of 800k-1,200k units.”

By way of comparison, the Quest 2 has sold over 15 million units to date. Numbers for the Quest Pro are yet to trickle in, but Meta was hoping for 1m in the first year (that may be optimistic).

Kuo also speculates that a big media launch for the new device, initially rumoured for January, might be pushed back a bit to align more closely with an expected ship date. This is definitely likely if the software problems seem fairly intractable, as delays do not play well in the market and nobody wants consumers to be more confused about the technology than they already seem so be.

Either way though, it definitely looks that 2023 will finally be the year Apple enters into the AR/VR fray. Game on.