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.
Apple Vision Pro
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.