As expected, Apple on Monday unveiled its first entry into the augmented-reality market, the Apple Vision Pro. But the specifics provided in the keynote at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference apparently left investors feeling a little cold.
While
Apple
stock (ticker: AAPL) hit a record higher earlier in Monday’s session, the stock slipped over the course of the more-than-two-hour presentation, as some specifics of the launch didn’t quite match the rumors and expectations.
Here are six key takeaways from Monday’s event, which more than a million people watched over the Web.
The leaks had a lot of the details wrong, and not in a good way: Maybe the biggest problem analysts are going to have with the launch of the Vision Pro is the price—at $3,499, that is about $500 more than the consensus expectation for a $3,000 price tag. Also, the device won’t start shipping until early 2024, missing the holiday season, and later than most on the Street had forecast. That’s a double-whammy, which could force some analysts to trim expectations for the impact of the Vision Pro for the company’s fiscal year ending in September 2024. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, who remains bullish on Apple, expects the company to sell just 150,000 in year one, and one million units in year two, but at a lower price point.
There were no killer apps: Apple showed off a variety of use cases for the Vision Pro goggles, which as my colleague Tae Kim notes, look a lot like the fake ones used in the movie Ready Player One. While Apple demonstrated both business and consumer uses for the goggles, there simply weren’t any killer gaming apps—or any other killer apps—that are likely users to spend that much money, priced at seven times the Quest 3 VR headset from
Meta Platforms
(META). Over time, though, Apple’s product sales are driven more by what other developers dream up than by their specs. Not for nothing is Apple launching at WWDC, leaving time for their many partners to dream up new software and experiences.
Cheap MacBooks: As Tae notes, the new 15-inch MacBook is priced very aggressively at $1,299. That should be good news for customers, and drive market-share increases for Apple. On the other hand, Apple announced a new Mac Pro powered by the company’s M2 Ultra chips—prices at a breathtaking $6,999. (For the same price you could buy five 15-inch MacBooks.)
Some cool new features: The noise level on what we now know is called Apple Vision Pro almost drowned out the flood tide of operating-system updates for the Mac, iPhone, Watch, and Apple TV (the device, not the streaming channel). My colleague Alex Eule was impressed with the new FaceTime capability for Apple TV, turning it into a videoconferencing system. And we were both impressed with StandBy, a new experience that turns your phone into a tableside clock that can show off data from a host of applications, and with the new Watch software for cyclists and hikers. And here’s big news: when connecting with Siri, you can now just “Siri,” and not “Hey Siri.”
What about AI?: Apple made few allusions to artificial intelligence, including improved autocorrection software. But Apple is still not being viewed as a big player in generative AI—while other key tech players, such as
Microsoft
(MSFT),
Alphabet
(GOOGL), and
Adobe
(ADBE), are aggressively rolling out new generative-AI software. At some point that is going to start worrying investors, who have dramatically bid up the share prices of key players in AI.
What was missing: Last year, the company spent considerable time talking about the future of CarPlay—but this time, the software for connecting your phone to your car was barely mentioned. As noted, while the company announced an Apple TV update, there was almost nothing about the state of the Apple TV+ streaming services. And the company spent almost no time at all talking about services, which were 22% of revenue in the latest quarter.
Write to Eric J. Savitz at eric.savitz@barrons.com
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