Vision Pro could soon get an Apple Intelligence upgrade, but can it boost sales?

Apple Vision Pro has just celebrated its first birthday, but it’s fair to say that the $3,500 AR headset hasn’t been the slam dunk that Apple executives would have liked it to be. Just two months after release, the company was reportedly slashing shipments in half due to a lack of demand, and internally there’s a worry that price isn’t the only problem with even early adopters using it less than anticipated.

Now Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has revealed plans for a major software update aimed at giving existing hardware a shot in the arm to boost sales. Gurman’s sources say these features could make up part of the visionOS 2.4 update that could arrive in beta this week, with a view to a full release in April.

The headline feature is the introduction of Apple Intelligence for the headset. Apple’s take on generative AI has previously only been available on recent iPhones, iPads and Macs, but with its M2 chipset and 16GB RAM, the existing Vision Pro hardware should be up to handling on-device processing.

That means that owners of Vision Pro are set to receive “standard features” such as the Writing Tools interface laced with ChatGPT, Gemoji and the Image Playground app. If there are unique Apple Intelligence features for Vision Pro in the works, they aren’t mentioned in the article.

Away from AI, Apple reportedly has another couple of tricks up its sleeve to drive interest in the headset. Firstly, a new app is reportedly on the way to view “spatial content tailored to the device, including 3D images and panoramas aggregated from outside sources”. There will also be an “immersive video” arriving on February 21 about arctic surfing, Gurman writes.

Finally, Apple plans to introduce a “revamped mode for guest users”, letting owners temporarily loan their devices to others. Not only will this make it easier for multi-user households (assuming they take the same optical inserts), but “the company believes such a process could help users excite their friends and family about the Vision Pro” which could potentially lead to sales.

Wishful thinking?

As solid as these additions all sound, that feels like a stretch. The biggest bar to mass adoption of Vision Pro has always been its sky-high pricing, with a single unit costing the same as seven Meta Quest 3 headsets.

While making Vision Pro easier to demo to interested friends and colleagues might generate a few more sales, it’s unlikely to be a serious game changer, and I’m dubious that the AI features will have much impact either.

Not only does it assume people are excited about Apple Intelligence more broadly — something that, anecdotally, I’m not really seeing outside of the tech press — but the features Gurman mentions are all just replicating what you can get on iPhone, iPad and Mac.

It’s safe to assume that any early adopters of Vision Pro are already deep in the Apple ecosystem, so will this really be that exciting? Or, to put it another way, why use ChatGPT to compose a document in Vision Pro when it’s easy enough to do on your Mac or iPhone?

Of course, this is likely just a first step, and there’s definitely potential for Vision Pro to do some truly amazing stuff with artificial intelligence. Its starting point, however, sounds pretty underwhelming from where I’m sitting.

But what else can Apple do? It has to try to boost Vision Pro sales somehow, and potentially interested consumers will ultimately be less likely to bite if it appears software updates are dwindling and the company is losing interest.

Nonetheless, it feels like the next big test for market appetite won’t come through new software, but hardware. From my perspective, a lot is riding on that cheaper model that’s reportedly in the works.