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Apple's Vision Pro headset went on sale outside the United States for the first time today, in the first of two waves of expanded availability.
The $3,499 "spatial computing" device launched back in February in the US, but it hasn't taken the tech world by storm. Part of that has been its regional launch, with some of the biggest markets still lacking access.
Apple announced that the product would be sold internationally during its keynote at the Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month.
Further Reading
I worked exclusively in Vision Pro for a week—here’s how it wentThe first new markets to get Vision Pro shipments are China, Japan, and Singapore—those are the ones where it went on sale today.
A second wave will come on July 12, with the headset rolling out in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
When we first tested the Vision Pro in February, we wrote that it was a technically impressive device with a lot of untapped potential. It works very well as a personal entertainment device for frequent travelers, in particular. However, its applications for productivity and gaming still need to be expanded to justify the high price.
Of course, there have been conflicting rumors of late about just how expensive Apple plans to keep its mixed reality devices. One report claimed that the company put the brakes on a new version of the Vision Pro for now, opting instead to develop a cheaper alternative for a 2025 launch.
But another report in Bloomberg suggested that's an overstatement. It simply noted that the Vision Pro 2 has been slightly delayed from its original target launch window and reported that the cheaper model will come first.
In any case, availability will have to expand and the price will ultimately have to come down if augmented reality can become the major computing revolution that Apple CEO Tim Cook has predicted. This international rollout is the next step to test whether there's a market for that.
Original Article Published at Arstechnica
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