Twelve years after taking over from Steve Jobs, Cook has finally ushered in his true One more thing moment, pinning his hopes on using MR (augmented reality) to open up the post-iPhone era.

At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in the early morning hours of June 6, the MR device was officially named Apple Vision Pro, not Reality Pro as previously rumored, and priced at $3,499 (about RMB 25,000), higher than the rumored $3,000 starting price, and the sale was delayed until early next year and limited to the U.S. only. The launch will be delayed until early next year and limited to the U.S. only, instead of being delivered this fall, other countries or regions will have to wait until later next year to be eligible for purchase.

During the two-hour keynote, Apple unveiled the new 15-inch MacBook Air with M2 chips, Mac Studio with M2 Max and M2 Ultra chips, and Mac Pro with M2 Ultra chips, and unveiled the features of iOS 17, macOS 14, iPadOS 17, watchOS 10 and other four systems, watchOS 10 and other four major system feature updates, the official versions of these latest systems, will be pushed to all end users this fall.

As the highlight of this year's WWDC, Apple spent nearly an hour explaining the design, experience and technological innovation of its first MR product.

The day before Apple's MR launch, Ming-Chi Kuo, a well-known Apple analyst at Tianfeng International Securities, posted that in the long run, the key factor in the success of Apple's AR/MR headset is whether it can be highly integrated with artificial intelligence (AI) or generative artificial intelligence (AIGC), but spurred by the soaring share price of Nvidia, investors are more concerned about when Apple will launch a ChatGPT-like service than than headset devices.

Although Apple did not mention the AI Big Model-related movement, when introducing the iOS 17 feature update, Apple executives described the smart upgrades to keyboard text input and dictation with Transformer, the hottest language prediction model of the moment.

In just one year, AIGC has replaced Metaverse as the latest trend. Meta, which once bet heavily on the meta-universe, saw its stock price plummet over 70% at one time and made two rounds of internal layoffs of 10,000 people; PICO, which was acquired by billions of bytes, saw its 2,000-person team exploded with a 15% layoff plan; Microsoft, Google, Tencent, Baidu and other technology companies that laid out the meta-universe also saw their projects and products downsized.

Under the meta-universe winter, the hopes of the whole village of VR/AR industry are now placed on Apple alone.

Despite Cook's high-profile comparison of Vision Pro with the era of personal computing opened by Mac and the era of mobile computing opened by iPhone, shouting the slogan of "the era of space computing is coming", the capital market is not excited by Vision Pro, which does not have any breakthrough innovation in appearance design and application experience. However, the capital market is not excited by Apple's new enthusiasm for Vision Pro, which is not innovative in terms of design and application experience.

On the evening of June 5, Beijing time, after the opening of the U.S. stock market, Apple's share price once rose over 1.4%. After the release of Vision Pro, Apple's share price dropped 0.76% and continued to drop 0.28% after the market closed.

01

In order to form a difference with existing VR/AR products, Apple brought many highlight products and functional design on Vision Pro.

The most intuitive embodiment is that Apple Vision Pro is no longer equipped with a peripheral handle. Just as the Mac has a mouse and the iPhone has multi-touch, Apple has developed a new 3D interactive interface for Vision Pro that can be used without the need for a controller or additional hardware, but with the cooperation of the eyes, hands and voice to complete a variety of interactive actions. For example, you can move your eyes to navigate, pinch your fingers to make selections, and flick your palm to scroll through pages.

According to Apple's official statement, the cooperation of hands and eyes "feels like controlling everything with your mind."

To turn on voice typing, users can simply gaze at the search bar to turn it on, and Vision Pro also supports using Siri to quickly open and close applications.

To make things easier, Apple has given Vision Pro two physical buttons, a digital knob that adjusts the size of the canvas to change the user's level of immersion in the spatial environment, and a button to take photos or record videos with one click.

In Cook "few people think it's natural to be confined to a certain world. Because we are all social beings," Apple has designed an innovative feature called EyeSight on Vision Pro.

02

Apple has been working hard for eight years to strike a balance between the ideal and the real, and then push MR into mass production.

In 2015, considered the "Year of VR," Apple just completed the acquisition of German startup Metaio. The acquisition of the project, which was incubated within Volkswagen, was originally intended to enhance Apple's self-driving system with its AR technology, but with the virtual reality boom, Apple relied on Metaio to form its AR/VR project team. Since then, Apple has invested more than $1 billion in the project each year. Apple has since invested more than $1 billion in the project each year, and has built up an R&D team of thousands of people. In recent years, Apple has acquired more than 10 companies related to VR/AR technology.

According to The Information, Apple's VR/AR project has caused major internal disagreements, and the board of directors once suspended the project's research and development, and the product line has changed again and again.

In 2016, Apple's board of directors had focused on a large number of VR/AR devices and prototypes, demo demonstrations, etc. At first, Apple had considered adopting a "VR box" type design to achieve VR functionality by matching smartphones, at the insistence of former Apple designer Jonny Ivey, but then VR/AR project leader Mike Rockwell, then head of the VR/AR program, wanted to launch a more powerful and relevant device in the form of a VR all-in-one.

In the end, under the coordination of Cook, Apple chose a compromise route - first to develop the MR form of the product, and then gradually evolve to a more lightweight, compact and powerful AR form.

AR is the field that Cook has always been optimistic about. in a 2017 interview with Indenpendent, Cook said, "AR is an idea as great as smartphones."

In a December 2021 interview with Time magazine after the metaverse concept hit the big time, Cook was even more direct, saying, "Metaverse and AR are obviously two different words, and I would only call them AR."

The internal disagreement has led to a change in the external release time of Apple's head-up display. According to Bloomberg, the Apple headset was initially planned to be announced in 2019 and put on public sale in 2020, then adjusted to be announced in 2021 and officially put on sale in 2022.

In the VR/AR market expansion on the delayed results of Apple, but also once tasted the resulting bitter fruit, the first is the loss of talent.

According to Bloomberg, about 100 engineers were poached from Apple in the second half of 2021 after Meta bet fully on the meta-universe. To retain key employees, Apple even had to pay huge bonuses in the form of stock to some engineers in chip design, hardware, some software and operations.

Just three months before the Vision Pro went on sale, Apple was even hesitant to delay it again internally. According to the Financial Times, which broke the story in March, the design team recommended patience until the technical path to a thinner, lighter AR device was cleared, meaning it would take a few more years for the product to go live. The operations team, on the other hand, wanted to get the product online as soon as possible, even if the device would be bulky and expensive.

In the end, Cook chose to support the operations team and override the design team's objections, which finalized plans for the Vision Pro to launch at WWDC this year.

The price of the rushed launch is that Apple has already revised downward the sales of its first MR product from the original 3 million units sold annually, all the way down to 900,000 units. According to Ming-Chi Kuo, Vision Pro shipments are even expected to be just 200,000-300,000 units.

Behind the dramatic shrinkage in sales, there is an implied adjustment in Apple's strategy. According to Bloomberg technology reporter Gurman's analysis, Apple's first MR headset does not aim to make a profit, but to establish a solid foothold in the VR/AR market as soon as possible, thus consolidating the company's market position.

Apple's real purpose is to quickly obtain first-hand feedback from users and the market through Vision Pro, and with subsequent product iterations, to lower the price step by step and evolve to AR glasses form, that is, the rumored Apple Glasses, that is the ultimate weapon Apple plans to harvest the market.

Twelve years after taking over from Steve Jobs, Cook has finally ushered in his true One more thing moment, pinning his hopes on using MR (augmented reality) to open up the post-iPhone era.

At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in the early morning hours of June 6, the MR device was officially named Apple Vision Pro, not Reality Pro as previously rumored, and priced at $3,499 (about RMB 25,000), higher than the rumored $3,000 starting price, and the sale was delayed until early next year and limited to the U.S. only. The launch will be delayed until early next year and limited to the U.S. only, instead of being delivered this fall, other countries or regions will have to wait until later next year to be eligible for purchase.

During the two-hour keynote, Apple unveiled the new 15-inch MacBook Air with M2 chips, Mac Studio with M2 Max and M2 Ultra chips, and Mac Pro with M2 Ultra chips, and unveiled the features of iOS 17, macOS 14, iPadOS 17, watchOS 10 and other four systems, watchOS 10 and other four major system feature updates, the official versions of these latest systems, will be pushed to all end users this fall.

As the highlight of this year's WWDC, Apple spent nearly an hour explaining the design, experience and technological innovation of its first MR product.

The day before Apple's MR launch, Ming-Chi Kuo, a well-known Apple analyst at Tianfeng International Securities, posted that in the long run, the key factor in the success of Apple's AR/MR headset is whether it can be highly integrated with artificial intelligence (AI) or generative artificial intelligence (AIGC), but spurred by the soaring share price of Nvidia, investors are more concerned about when Apple will launch a ChatGPT-like service than than headset devices.

Although Apple did not mention the AI Big Model-related movement, when introducing the iOS 17 feature update, Apple executives described the smart upgrades to keyboard text input and dictation with Transformer, the hottest language prediction model of the moment.

In just one year, AIGC has replaced Metaverse as the latest trend. Meta, which once bet heavily on the meta-universe, saw its stock price plummet over 70% at one time and made two rounds of internal layoffs of 10,000 people; PICO, which was acquired by billions of bytes, saw its 2,000-person team exploded with a 15% layoff plan; Microsoft, Google, Tencent, Baidu and other technology companies that laid out the meta-universe also saw their projects and products downsized.

Under the meta-universe winter, the hopes of the whole village of VR/AR industry are now placed on Apple alone.

Despite Cook's high-profile comparison of Vision Pro with the era of personal computing opened by Mac and the era of mobile computing opened by iPhone, shouting the slogan of "the era of space computing is coming", the capital market is not excited by Vision Pro, which does not have any breakthrough innovation in appearance design and application experience. However, the capital market is not excited by Apple's new enthusiasm for Vision Pro, which is not innovative in terms of design and application experience.

On the evening of June 5, Beijing time, after the opening of the U.S. stock market, Apple's share price once rose over 1.4%. After the release of Vision Pro, Apple's share price dropped 0.76% and continued to drop 0.28% after the market closed.

01

In order to form a difference with existing VR/AR products, Apple brought many highlight products and functional design on Vision Pro.

The most intuitive embodiment is that Apple Vision Pro is no longer equipped with a peripheral handle. Just as the Mac has a mouse and the iPhone has multi-touch, Apple has developed a new 3D interactive interface for Vision Pro that can be used without the need for a controller or additional hardware, but with the cooperation of the eyes, hands and voice to complete a variety of interactive actions. For example, you can move your eyes to navigate, pinch your fingers to make selections, and flick your palm to scroll through pages.

According to Apple's official statement, the cooperation of hands and eyes "feels like controlling everything with your mind."

To turn on voice typing, users can simply gaze at the search bar to turn it on, and Vision Pro also supports using Siri to quickly open and close applications.

To make things easier, Apple has given Vision Pro two physical buttons, a digital knob that adjusts the size of the canvas to change the user's level of immersion in the spatial environment, and a button to take photos or record videos with one click.

In Cook "few people think it's natural to be confined to a certain world. Because we are all social beings," Apple has designed an innovative feature called EyeSight on Vision Pro.

02

Apple has been working hard for eight years to strike a balance between the ideal and the real, and then push MR into mass production.

In 2015, considered the "Year of VR," Apple just completed the acquisition of German startup Metaio. The acquisition of the project, which was incubated within Volkswagen, was originally intended to enhance Apple's self-driving system with its AR technology, but with the virtual reality boom, Apple relied on Metaio to form its AR/VR project team. Since then, Apple has invested more than $1 billion in the project each year. Apple has since invested more than $1 billion in the project each year, and has built up an R&D team of thousands of people. In recent years, Apple has acquired more than 10 companies related to VR/AR technology.

According to The Information, Apple's VR/AR project has caused major internal disagreements, and the board of directors once suspended the project's research and development, and the product line has changed again and again.

In 2016, Apple's board of directors had focused on a large number of VR/AR devices and prototypes, demo demonstrations, etc. At first, Apple had considered adopting a "VR box" type design to achieve VR functionality by matching smartphones, at the insistence of former Apple designer Jonny Ivey, but then VR/AR project leader Mike Rockwell, then head of the VR/AR program, wanted to launch a more powerful and relevant device in the form of a VR all-in-one.

In the end, under the coordination of Cook, Apple chose a compromise route - first to develop the MR form of the product, and then gradually evolve to a more lightweight, compact and powerful AR form.

AR is the field that Cook has always been optimistic about. in a 2017 interview with Indenpendent, Cook said, "AR is an idea as great as smartphones."

In a December 2021 interview with Time magazine after the metaverse concept hit the big time, Cook was even more direct, saying, "Metaverse and AR are obviously two different words, and I would only call them AR."

The internal disagreement has led to a change in the external release time of Apple's head-up display. According to Bloomberg, the Apple headset was initially planned to be announced in 2019 and put on public sale in 2020, then adjusted to be announced in 2021 and officially put on sale in 2022.

In the VR/AR market expansion on the delayed results of Apple, but also once tasted the resulting bitter fruit, the first is the loss of talent.

According to Bloomberg, about 100 engineers were poached from Apple in the second half of 2021 after Meta bet fully on the meta-universe. To retain key employees, Apple even had to pay huge bonuses in the form of stock to some engineers in chip design, hardware, some software and operations.

Just three months before the Vision Pro went on sale, Apple was even hesitant to delay it again internally. According to the Financial Times, which broke the story in March, the design team recommended patience until the technical path to a thinner, lighter AR device was cleared, meaning it would take a few more years for the product to go live. The operations team, on the other hand, wanted to get the product online as soon as possible, even if the device would be bulky and expensive.

In the end, Cook chose to support the operations team and override the design team's objections, which finalized plans for the Vision Pro to launch at WWDC this year.

The price of the rushed launch is that Apple has already revised downward the sales of its first MR product from the original 3 million units sold annually, all the way down to 900,000 units. According to Ming-Chi Kuo, Vision Pro shipments are even expected to be just 200,000-300,000 units.

Behind the dramatic shrinkage in sales, there is an implied adjustment in Apple's strategy. According to Bloomberg technology reporter Gurman's analysis, Apple's first MR headset does not aim to make a profit, but to establish a solid foothold in the VR/AR market as soon as possible, thus consolidating the company's market position.

Apple's real purpose is to quickly obtain first-hand feedback from users and the market through Vision Pro, and with subsequent product iterations, to lower the price step by step and evolve to AR glasses form, that is, the rumored Apple Glasses, that is the ultimate weapon Apple plans to harvest the market.