It Could Be Harder Than You Think to Get Your Hands on Apple’s New Vision Pro

Even though Apple has been running at full steam over the past few weeks to crank out its new Vision Pro headset in mass quantities and get it shipped out to every one of its 273 US Apple Retail Stores, it seems that it may not have as many to spare as some have predicted.

It’s not uncommon for new Apple products to be “constrained” at launch. For example, the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max had shipping dates quickly slip into early November as Apple worked to keep up with demand. There’s no reason to assume the Vision Pro will be an exception. While Apple would undoubtedly love to sell a million of them in the first few weeks, it’s also realistic to know that its new $3,500 spatial computing headset isn’t exactly going to fly off the shelves.

Long before the headset launched, Apple’s ambitions were reportedly on the conservative side, with sources telling Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman that Apple only expected to sell about one headset per store per day, with a maximum of around 180,000 units in the first year.

However, supply chain sources estimated in November that Apple’s initial run would be about 400,000 units, which, according to The Financial Times was a “drastic cut to production forecasts.” This suggested Apple had much higher hopes, although even 400,000 sounds optimistic for the pricey mixed-reality headset. Confined to the US, that number means Apple would be planning to sell around four Vision Pro units in each of its US Apple Stores each and every day this year.

That number may have been a bit on the optimistic side, though, with veteran Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo now predicting that Apple’s initial shipments will land at around 60,000 to 80,000 units.

To be clear, Kuo is talking only about the first wave — the number of headsets that will be available on launch day. Apple is almost certainly continuing to produce more Vision Pro headsets. Like its often-constrained iPhone Pro models, everyone who wants a Vision Pro will be able to get one — they may just have to wait a little longer for it to show up.

Kuo also suggests that Apple’s marketing hype around the Vision Pro will result in those initial shipments selling out very fast — even though Apple hasn’t even done a great job of defining exactly why anybody needs one.

Although Apple has not clearly defined the product positioning and key applications of Vision Pro and the price is not cheap, the user experience (e.g., giving users the illusion that they can control the user interface with their minds) created by the groundbreaking technology innovations, along with the base of core fans and heavy users, should make it easy to sell out after the release.

Ming-Chi Kuo

This means if you’re really warming up your credit card to splurge on Apple’s $3,500 headset, you may want to make sure you’re first in line when pre-orders open, which is going to happen on Friday, January 19, at 5:00 a.m. PT. If you miss that window, you may still be able to pick one up at your local Apple Store, as Apple will almost certainly be reserving some stock for in-store sales on launch day, as it does with other products like the iPhone.

It’s unclear what that division of units will be. Still, even if the low side of Kuo’s predictions are correct and Apple only allocated half of its first 60,000 units to its stores, that works out to a little over 100 per store — assuming they’re divided evenly. It’s more likely that larger Apple stores in busier metropolitan areas will have more stock than those in smaller communities, but it’s still hard to believe that every store is going to sell out of Vision Pro headsets on launch day, considering its high price tag.