Apple Vision Pro ships January 2024, new Macs fall 2024

As part of a longer post about tech trends in 2024, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has predicted that the Apple Vision Pro will start shipping to Apple in early January, with a new Mac event happening near the end of the year.

In a post to Medium, Kuo offers his end-of-year roundup with forecasts for the tech industry in 2024. Most of the note pertains to Android and the annual schedule — but he does chime in on when he expects Apple Vision Pro to arrive.

Calling it Apple's most important product for 2024, he says that the headset is currently in mass production, and mass shipments to Apple will start in the first week of January.

Given this timeline, he says that Apple Vision Pro will most likely hit store shelves in late January or early February, with about 500,000 units shipping in total across all of 2024.

"If user feedback on Vision Pro is better than expected, it will help strengthen the market consensus that 'Vision Pro is the next star product in consumer electronics' and the related supply chain stock price," Kuo postulates.

Apple has repeatedly stated that its release of the Apple Vision Pro will occur "early" in 2024, though without fixing down an actual date. Kuo's report on Christmas Day is not the first to suggest January, as Mark Gurman said in early December that it was likely to arrive in that timeframe.

In his discussion, Gurman says that an initiative to bring select store employees to Apple Park for training will happen in January, with the employees returning home to then teach the rest of their respective stores.

The seminars are being scheduled to start in the middle of January, with each employee getting two days of training.

Though customers will be able to reserve their headsets online, it is believed that they will be pushed towards picking up the headsets from retail. Apple Stores will apparently receive equipment soon, all to assemble and box the headset on-site for the customer.

New Macs expected in late 2024

He's also expecting a new Mac media event in the fourth quarter of 2024, after the iPhone 16 debut. At present, other than WWDC, he doesn't have an event pinned for the first half of 2024.

This timetable for new Macs seems too long. It seems unlikely that Apple will wait until the Fall of 2024 for M3 Ultra machines like the Mac Studio or Mac Pro refresh — but given the pro focus, they may debut at WWDC. Kuo's timetable also seems stretched out for M3 Mac mini and MacBook Air as well.

Kuo's reputation has taken some hits as of late. Most recently, he declared that Apple was done for 2023 — and then the company rolled out the M3 MacBook Pro lineup just two weeks later.

We've ranked this prediction as "likely" not because of any particular insight, but mostly because it has already been predicted, is obvious, and is safe.

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16 Comments

keithw 152 comments · 20 Years

About 10 months ago

It would seem silly to wait until the end of 2024 for the M3 Mac Mini, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro, since the M3 Pro and Max are already shipping in other products. I can't imagine many people are buying the M2 Mac Studio since the maxed out M3 Max MPB already outperforms the M2 Studio Ultra.

chasm 3590 comments · 10 Years

keithw said:

It would seem silly to wait until the end of 2024 for the M3 Mac Mini, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro, since the M3 Pro and Max are already shipping in other products.

Agreed. I think there will be something in the spring for the Mini and Air (and iPads!), the M3 Ultra stuff will debut at WWDC, but perhaps not be available until the fall, and the fall event will focus on iPhones.

Maybe this is my relative poverty talking, but I’m skeptical of Apple moving half a million Vision Pro headsets across 2024. I’m 100 percent certain the reviews of it by users and professional reviewers will be strong, but until a use case beyond amusement/alternative work space can be made (or maybe a “killer app”), that’s a lot of money to spend on what is, at present, a (fancy, cutting-edge) $3,500 toy.

I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect Apple will aim it squarely at their “lots of disposable income” audience and hope developers fill in the gaps to make it something more useful than it seems at present.

charlesn 1153 comments · 11 Years

chasm said:

keithw said:

It would seem silly to wait until the end of 2024 for the M3 Mac Mini, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro, since the M3 Pro and Max are already shipping in other products.

Agreed. I think there will be something in the spring for the Mini and Air (and iPads!), the M3 Ultra stuff will debut at WWDC, but perhaps not be available until the fall, and the fall event will focus on iPhones.

Maybe this is my relative poverty talking, but I’m skeptical of Apple moving half a million Vision Pro headsets across 2024. I’m 100 percent certain the reviews of it by users and professional reviewers will be strong, but until a use case beyond amusement/alternative work space can be made (or maybe a “killer app”), that’s a lot of money to spend on what is, at present, a (fancy, cutting-edge) $3,500 toy.
I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect Apple will aim it squarely at their “lots of disposable income” audience and hope developers fill in the gaps to make it something more useful than it seems at present.

And based on your vast experience with the capabilities of the Vision Pro, what leads you to call it a $3,500 "toy?" All you can see is shoehorning it into what's already possible and then concluding that it doesn't really have a purpose. Your complete-lack-of-imagination reaction reminds me of all those who dismissed iPad at launch as nothing more than a big iPhone. Yeah, and then people started writing apps that turned it into everything from a "cash register" at stores to a canvas for creative design professionals to an indispensable tool for hospitals... and countless other uses which had nothing to do with it being "a big iPhone." I'd argue that the iPad has never had a "killer app" in its history, just a ton of useful apps in countless different fields, but that sure hasn't hurt sales. As for Vision Pro: just the training apps alone that could be written for it, allowing people to practice complex jobs in a 3-D virtual space before having to do it IRL should make 500K in global sales an easy number to hit in 2024. Like the iPad, the Vision Pro brings an entirely new set of capabilities to the computing space and I believe that companies and working professionals, not entertainment-seeking gamers, will be the biggest customers in its early years. What Apple needs to do right now is deliver a product that "just works" as advertised--it can't be a fragile, buggy piece of crap that has to be pulled from the market like, say, Samsung's first folding screen phone. Tim knows how much Apple is betting on Vision Pro succeeding and only the foolhardy would bet against Tim.

aderutter 622 comments · 17 Years

I would expect Macs updated to the M3 family first half of ‘24; and what Kuo is referencing is likely an M4 event.

M3 Mac Studio (and others) could well be simple press release updates without an event.

We’ll be getting M3 in an iPad pretty soon, so the Macs need to keep ahead.

harrykatsaros 89 comments · 8 Years

Am I the only one that thinks that Apple will hold a Vision Pro focused event prior to release to demonstrate some new use cases now that developers have been able to spend some time with the device? Or am I way off here?