Want to dive into Apple’s first $3,500 ‘spatial computer?’ Then you should know how long you’ll have to wait to get one.
Apple’s Vision Pro is set to wander its way into a few lucky Apple megafans’ living rooms starting Friday, but if you were a bit late to jump on the “spatial computing” hype train, there’s still time to get yourself one of the upcoming $3,500 headsets.
Buying a Vision Pro is a bit more involved than your usual Apple release, not just because of its massive upfront cost for a consumer-level device. Apple has added a few more hoops to jump through to order one. Not to mention, you may find the number of apps to start rather limiting, even if the hardware has plenty of processing power, offering small yet notable innovations to the VR genre.
With preorders having already been underway for the past weeks now, you should know straight off that it will take you a fair bit longer to get your hands on a Vision Pro, especially if you’re ordering online. If you try to order one now, the one store tells you you’ll need to hold out until early March. Picking it up in a physical Apple Store should simplify the waiting process, as pickups are available on February 2.
However, that may depend on availability at your local retailer since the Apple Vision Pro is currently sold out at most places.
There are three versions of the Apple Vision Pro available. The starting $3,500 version comes with 256 GB of internal storage. The next 512 GB edition costs $3,700. If you want to nab a Vision Pro with 1 TB of internal storage, expect to pony up $3,900. There’s the option to finance your purchase with 0% APR through an Apple Card, which is only available when you go through the Apple Store.
There’s also a lot more involved in purchasing a headset than there usually is when trying to tell Apple to “shut and take my money.” When you first hit up the Vision Pro purchase page, Apple directs iPhone and iPad users to its App Store, which will prompt you to perform a face scan. After that, you need to return to the Apple store page, where the company will ask if you need any prescription glasses inserts provided by Zeiss.
Those who were keen to get their hands on a Vision Pro have already led to an estimated 160,000 to 180,000 preorders so far. That’s not a lot compared to the usual iPhone release, but remember, this is a $3,500 headset. The upfront cost to build these devices has most analysts thinking Apple wants to ship far fewer Vision Pros than it does its other products, and currently, most expect Apple will only ship about 500,000 Vision Pros this year.
Still, there’s not much impetus for going in early on a new headset. Limited supply might make it harder to procure a Vision Pro in the future, though that’s only if the headset proves far more popular than even Apple anticipated. Considering what most folks who have had the chance to test the device have said, you’re probably safe taking a wait-and-see approach.
The Vision Pro is akin to other enterprise-level VR headsets, though with a fair bit of Apple’s own flair thrown into the mix. First, the headset is powered by Apple’s 8-core M2 Chip with an additional 10 GPUs and a 16-core “neural engine” to handle various AI tasks. The chip boasts 16 GB of integrated memory.
The next most important thing for most users is the Vision Pro’s displays, and these are already a doozy.
