After 7 years of research and development, Apple finally released its first-generation MR (VR and AR fusion) headset Vision Pro. At 2:22 a.m. Beijing time on June 6th, Apple CEO Tim Cook officially announced this product at Apple headquarters in California, USA. Cook said at the press conference that this is a revolutionary new product and the starting point of a great journey. Prior to this, Cook once said that AR is a technology that changes the world, and it is comparable to the iPhone 10 years ago. According to the official disclosure, this Vision Pro is as high as US$3,499, exceeding the previous market expectation of US$3,000. The product is not expected to be officially launched until early 2024.
Keyword 1: innovation
A technician from a domestic VR company stayed up all night to watch the Apple press conference. He told reporters that his feelings were quite amazing. "I hope there will be breakthroughs in spatial modeling and application levels. Looking at the demonstration now, there are indeed breakthroughs. Apple has demonstrated technologies that other equipment manufacturers have not had before." Compared with the VR headsets that have shipped over 10 million units on the market, Apple MR headsets are lighter, have a longer battery life, and are more expensive. It no longer needs a handle, it can interact with eyes and gestures, and it is no longer isolated from the world with a head-mounted display. "It can make people wear glasses to live a normal life." The above-mentioned VR company technician told reporters that this should be Apple. the route to take. However, at present, Apple is still far from the goal. At the current press conference, people are standing still and using the headset. To truly realize normal life, humans need to move freely with headsets. This degree of freedom modeling requires high computing power and high technical difficulty. Li Zhifei, the founder of Momenwen, commented that Apple is really convincing in terms of product design capabilities such as eye tracking, not affecting communication with the outside world, and gesture control. But it is hard to say whether it will become the next iPhone and lead the next decade. He hopes it can open up the next generation of human-computer interaction. Apple has been investing in the MR field for 7 years. Bloomberg technology editor Mark Gurman, who has long tracked and reported on Apple, said in May of this year that Apple has thousands of employees working on MR headsets, including Apple Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, who is regarded as Cook's successor. The headset took twice as long to develop as the iPhone. This time, Apple defines Vision Pro as a spatial computing device, and this product is also equipped with visionOS, a spatial operating system specially launched by Apple. "Just as the Mac brought us into the era of personal computing, the iPhone brought us into the era of mobile computing, Apple Vision Pro will bring us into the era of spatial computing." Apple CEO Cook said.
However, an XR (extended reality) person from a major factory also said that Meta has also demonstrated a three-dimensional spatial operating system before, which is not unique to Apple. He believes that Apple's greater competitiveness lies in connecting new products with the original ecology and opening up a larger sales space. Liu Haolei, an XR content practitioner, organized the entire company to watch the Apple conference. He told reporters that Apple is making innovations in the way it is good at. "It may not be subversive for some geeks, but it is amazing enough for ordinary users and consumers. , This is Apple's ultimate appeal." He now feels very motivated, "Domestic developers have a chance to start a prairie fire when they meet Apple."
Keyword 2: high price
The price is equivalent to RMB 25,000, and the general feedback in the domestic industry is that it has exceeded the acceptable range of ordinary users. Zhong Jianhui, secretary-general of the Shenzhen Augmented Reality Technology Application Association, believes that this product can only be used on the B-end. Developers and MR start-up companies will be interested in buying it back for research. Even if other people are enthusiasts, they should not be too willing to buy. big. Zhong Jianhui has been working in the VR and AR industries for 7 years, and he has also waited for Apple for 7 years. He told reporters that Apple's mobile phone, tablet and other businesses have encountered bottlenecks, and MR headsets are shouldering the important task of becoming the next growth point. At present, Apple's revenue has declined for the second consecutive quarter. Among them, the Mac and iPad businesses have fallen significantly. The first reaction of the XR (extended reality) people from the above-mentioned major manufacturers when they saw the price of Vision Pro announced by Apple was that it exceeded expectations. He believes that this product is more about showing the upper limit of product development in the XR industry, and there is no obvious consideration based on the needs of consumers. He also mentioned that from a technical point of view, Vision Pro provides the best solution supported by the existing industry, and as more developers join and the product content is rich enough, the mass production of the product will also increase the cost. The compression brings a lot of space. The XR person from the above-mentioned big factory first paid attention to the display effect of Vision Pro. He noticed that the visual display of Vision Pro uses two Sony Micro-OLED screens with a resolution of 4K. to the effect". He said that the price of Sony's micro-display is relatively expensive, "probably about 200 US dollars per piece, and the cost of the entire display optics of Apple's Vision Pro may account for 40% of the overall cost." Visin, a digital enthusiast born in the 90s, was a fanatic of VR in the first half of 2022, but his enthusiasm faded along with the industry in the second half of the year. The reason is that it is too troublesome to remove the device each time, and there are too few interesting contents, which are the main reasons why he gave up VR products. At present, his VR products have been sold on Xianyu.
Keyword 3: still early
Zhong Jianhui's judgment is that it will take a few more years until the price drops and the ecology is perfected before the MR industry can truly explode. At present, it seems that Apple's own confidence is not great. Apple originally hoped to ship around 3 million mixed-reality headsets per year, but has now slashed those estimates to 900,000, according to Bloomberg. Apple executives also expect that the mixed reality headset will not be an instant hit, but may follow a similar trajectory as the Apple Watch, with iterations of refreshed headsets and lower-priced versions available to consumers. interest will gradually increase. In the field of virtual reality equipment, Meta's VR headset Quest currently has the highest market share, and its shipments will account for nearly 80% in 2022
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In second place is PICO, a subsidiary of ByteDance, with a share of 10%. However, sales of these products are currently in decline. According to the same data from IDC, in the first quarter of 2023, the global shipments of AR and VR headsets will slow down sharply, down 54.4% year-on-year. Among them, VR headsets accounted for 96.2% of the total shipments. "After the Chinese New Year, the news from several major manufacturers is not very favorable." An employee of a medium-sized domestic VR company told reporters that after the metaverse craze subsided, many VR companies' capital chains were broken, and major manufacturers also reduced their investment. This year, the VR industry as a whole is in a "too difficult" state. "I hope that Apple can inject new hope and vitality into the industry." He told reporters that he is looking forward to Apple's MR headset, and this expectation is also a common emotion in the current VR circle. According to the Huachuang Securities Research Report, Apple's launch of the MR headset is the fourth time that the technology giant has tried this new hardware category. In the past three times, when Samsung, Sony, and Meta released their products, they all had great expectations for the market, but in the end, sales fell short of expectations. The difference with Apple is that over the past 20 years, Apple has released many products that changed people's perception. The iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007, the iPad in 2010, and the Apple Watch in 2015 all lead the trend of the times. As an insider, Zhong Jianhui feels that the shipment volume of Apple's generation of MR products should not be high. "It looks more like a muscle show, bringing together all the powerful functions at no cost."
However, regardless of whether it is a blockbuster or not, Apple's official entry is already good enough news to make the industry once again Lively, allowing more people to enter, gave these practitioners a reassurance. "The sales volume of the first generation of Apple's iPhone was also very average. It continued to iterate. It was not until the fourth generation that the sales increased by leaps and bounds." Zhong Jianhui told reporters that the MR industry also needs constant iteration. Now it is a bit like returning to 2007. When Apple's first mobile phone was released, everything needed to be perfected.
