Is the Vision Air project failing? Apple is reported to shift focus to smart glasses, competing with Meta for the affordable market

Apple may make significant strategic adjustments to its ambitious Vision product line.

On October 12, renowned tech journalist Mark Gurman wrote in a Bloomberg column that, facing lackluster market performance of the $3,500 Vision Pro, Apple might shelve its more affordable headset project and instead focus resources on developing a lighter, more mainstream smart glasses.

This low-cost Vision Pro headset is speculated to be "Vision Air," which will be lighter and cheaper. However, Apple has reassigned some engineers working on this project to a team focused on developing smart glasses.

This shift not only reveals the difficulties the $3,500 Vision Pro faces on its path to the mass market but also indicates that Apple will engage in direct competition with rivals like Meta in the more promising smart glasses field.

Strategic Shift: From "Niche" to "Mass"

Gurman analyzes that Apple's DNA dictates that it is not a company chasing niche markets. Its immense success is built on mainstream products like the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, which have sold tens of millions to over a hundred million units.

However, the expensive, heavy, and application-deficient Vision Pro is still an impressive but limited-use device, and its closed design restricts it from becoming a tool that most people can wear all day.

In contrast, the smart glasses form factor is considered to have more potential.

After experiencing Meta's new Ray-Ban Displays, Gurman believes that smart glasses can naturally facilitate information viewing, phone answering, and hands-free photography, making this form factor more acceptable to the public than bulky headsets.

He believes that a well-optimized Apple smart glasses has the potential to become a product as successful as the Apple Watch, and may even evolve into a replacement for the iPhone—a vision that the Vision Pro can never achieve.

Therefore, he considers Apple's decision to pause the development of the affordable headset and redirect engineers to the smart glasses project as "the right decision."

Competitive Landscape: A Shared Path with Meta

Apple's strategic shift also echoes the movements of industry competitors.

Meta has shifted its focus from headset development to smart glasses. Samsung Electronics is about to launch a high-end headset that competes with the Vision Pro, but it is reportedly not expecting this product to become a high-volume seller, while also collaborating with partners like Google to develop smart glasses.

Reports indicate that Meta has not achieved much success with mixed reality headsets priced significantly lower than the Vision Pro. This seems to suggest that if a concept cannot attract consumers at a price point of $500 or lower, the issue may lie with the product form itself, rather than just the price.

The Future of the Vision Product Line

Gurman predicts that the shelving of the affordable headset does not mean the end of the Vision Pro product line. The future "Vision" series may evolve into a multi-tiered product portfolio:

• Low-end: Smart glasses without a display.

• Mid-range: Smart glasses with a display/true AR glasses.

• High-end: Vision Pro as the flagship product (which will continue to be updated and iterated).

In addition, future smart glasses are likely to continue running the visionOS operating system, allowing Apple's investment in this software to persist.

Apple has significant advantages in developing smart glasses, including design capabilities in wearable devices, efficient self-developed chips, and strong ecosystem integration capabilities. However, the biggest challenge lies in whether it can ultimately master AI-driven functionalities, which are seen as the key to the success of such devices