Burdens like high selling price and AI craze… “Possibility to breathe new life into the market”
On the 5th (local time), as Apple announces a new product, the ‘Vision Pro’ Mixed Reality (MR) headset after 9 years, attention is focused on whether this headset will be a ‘game changer’.
‘Vision Pro’ is a new product in a completely new category that Apple has introduced for the first time since the Apple Watch in 2014, and has received the attention of the market as an ambitious work even before its release.
7 years of development alone, 1,000 developers were put in.
In particular, Apple explained that all of Apple’s innovative technologies have been integrated into the Vision Pro, and it is a ‘wearable space computer’.
He also emphasized that this day “starts a whole new stage” after the iPhone.
Just as the functions of a personal computer were put into the iPhone in the hand, the functionality of the iPhone is now implemented through headphones called ‘Vision Pro’.
Apple is looking forward to the Vision Pro as a new growth engine as it faces a period of growth stagnation where sales have fallen over the past two quarters compared to last year.
Initially, Apple planned to replace the main function of the smartphone with a device that is worn all day as glasses by releasing ‘Apple Glass’, a lightweight augmented reality (AR) glasses.
However, due to technical limitations, the release of Apple Glass has been delayed indefinitely.
Apple emphasizes that ‘Vision Pro’ is a completely different technology to Metaverse (3D virtual reality). It is not a headset that operates a 3D virtual world, but a ‘wearable computer’.
The market places it in the virtual reality market category. And I don’t see this market as mature yet.
Meta (Facebook’s parent company), considered a leader in this market, invested more than 10 trillion won last year alone, but has not produced any significant results.
It is known that Apple has also significantly lowered its sales forecast for the first year of the release of MR headphones from 3 million units to 900,000 units, less than a third.
The launch price is also 3,499 dollars (about 4.57 million won), which is not a little burdensome for ordinary individuals to buy unless it is a company.
The artificial intelligence (AI) craze is also demanding for Apple. There was no mention of AI at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference held that day.
However, there is also the possibility that it can be a ‘game changer’.
This is because Apple has led the information technology (IT) industry by leading the development of innovative products such as the iPod and the iPhone that the market has never expected. Another strength is that it has a huge customer base of iPhone users.
CNN said, “If there’s one company that can prove the market’s skeptics wrong, it’s Apple.”
Meta has already revealed a new headset four days before Apple, and Samsung Electronics also joined Google and Qualcomm at the Galaxy S23 launch event earlier this year to build an XR (augmented reality) ecosystem that encompasses VR (virtual reality), AR, and MR. The competition is expected to intensify.
According to IDC, a market research company in the United States, the XR market is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 32% from $13.8 billion last year (about 18 trillion won) to about $50.9 billion (about 66.6 trillion after to win) in 2026.
Reporter Kim Jin-hee of Helloty |
