Malcolm Owen
The Apple Vision Pro is a costly item for Apple to manufacture, with nearly half of its $3,499 price tag covering its expensive components.
Compared to other headsets on the market, the Apple Vision Pro offers high performance and ships with an equally high price tag. While eye-watering to consumers, the $3,499 Apple charges is high, but Apple does have to pay component suppliers a considerable slice of the pie.
An estimate of the so-called "bill of materials" for the Apple Vision Pro by researchers at Omdia, shared with CNBC, prices the components at around $1,542 per headset. This accounts for approximately 44% of the price of the headset.
This figure only covers the manufacture of each headset, and doesn't take into account other costs Apple may incur, such as recouping research and development budgets, or marketing the headset to the public.
At over $1,500, the bill of materials is also higher than the retail cost of many current headsets, including the Meta Quest Pro at $999, or $1,499 at launch.
Omdia reckons the most expensive element of the headset are the two micro OLED displays, sourced from Sony, which cost $228 per display. At around 3,380 pixels per inch, the displays are arguably the most important parts, providing the high resolution and picture quality Apple needed for the product.
The displays are also more expensive than the chipsets used to power the experience. In second place, the chipset includes the M2 chip as well as the custom sensor-managing R1 chip.
The thoroughly high cost to produce each headset does make sense for Apple despite the prospect of minimal profit for the first-generation device. With refreshed models expected in the future, as well as refinements in component production and the benefit of economies of scale, Apple will eventually be able to reduce the per-device cost of the hardware.
It probably won't earn much of a profit from the initial Apple Vision Pro, but Apple stands a good chance of doing so with later models.
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10 Comments
If the bill of materials is over 1500 dollars, then I don't see that they can come with a way cheaper version soon. I mean one that cost less than 1500 bucks.
If there’s one thing Apple knows how to do better than anybody else, it’s introduce new products successfully.
Once they combine the M2 and R1 into a single chip (by the time that happens probably M6 and R3) and reduce other chips by consolidation the price will drop dramatically. It's a ways out but we all know it's coming. SoC specifically for VisionPro.
/edit. No getting around those $$$ displays though. It will always be expensive to be on the bleeding edge there. Perhaps AppleWatch will be the first with MicroLED displays, but VP will likely be second.
Since they only sell AVP directly to consumers, with no other current retail distribution, at least they don’t have to share any small margins with third parties, so they can afford to sell at a smaller mark-up. It makes sense for other reasons too, of course.