Ming-Chi Kuo

So when you follow the link under "Apple initially had a sales target of 3 million Vision Pro units in its first year", you'll see that this number came from Bloomberg's Marc Gurman, and is based on nothing. The author bolsters his argument by quoting Ming-Chi Kuo's similarly unsubstantiated "800,000 units" claim. Since the 72.5% accurate¹ Kuo can't possibly have guessed wrong, his face-saving explanation is that Apple intended to hit that number but has since had to slash production. Only, this doesn't agree with Kuo v2023.09, who noted, "Based on some component suppliers’ maximum production capacity estimates, Vision Pro shipments in 2024 will be at most 400,000–600,000 units"². (The Financial Times, The Information, and The Elec all reported on the 400-500K unit limit imposed by the availability of the ultra-high-resolution OLED microdisplays manufactured by Sony.) Also, Apple was telegraphing fewer than 400,000 units in 2024 way back in July of last year.³ Look, I understand that analysts gonna analyst. But anybody with even a tiny bit of tech history knowledge should understand by now that Apple plays the long game. This is just poorly-researched, long-form, "gotta generate engagement" shitposting. ¹ https://appletrack.com/ming-chi-kuo/ ²…

I'm sure the author has sincere concerns. I found the sweeping generalisations tough to read: > [Vision Pro is] an extremely alarming harbinger of how tech giants are going to know even more about our private lives and radically reshape our communities once again. Given that the author appears to think of himself as a victim, utterly powerless to resist: > Vision Pro isn't for creating content. It isn't for interacting with the world. It isn't even for walking around your own apartment. At best, at its core, it's yet another way for us to zone out and watch ever higher and higher definition TV and movies. I've never in my adult life vegged out as much as I did during my time with the Vision Pro. Anecdotally, I find that negative reviews of Vision Pro have tended towards emphatic "this sucks for everyone" rhetoric. Positive reviews, including those from folks using the device as their daily driver now, acknowledge its limitations and rough edges. > In the end, I followed the path of so many other Vision Pro early adopters and became an early returner. Vision Pro return rates are estimated at 1%.[^1] It figures: this is an early adopter product. The author of this post had a bad time with it and seems to be desperately reaching to draw generalisable conclusions, rather than sticking to his own subjective experience. Then again, his three bylines for Business Insider are: "My Apple Vision Pro Nightmare", "Weight wasn't the only thing I lost when I took a weight-loss…

I mean, if we're talking right now -- it absolutely has not. IDC predicts ~12 million AR/VR headset shipments in 2024, which is up 46% from 2023 (which was down 8.3% from 2022) but the Apple Watch, even though it had massive sales declines in 2023, was estimated to have sold 36-38 million units in 2023 [2]. Its wearables category did $39 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2023, which analysts estimate about half is attributable to Apple Watch. So right now, the entire AR/VR category is expected to ship 1/3 of the number of units of just the Apple Watch. Even if Apple sells 180,000 AVPs all with an MSRP of $4000 (so I'm being extra generous here), that's only $720m in revenue, or less than 3.7% of Apple Watch sales. And that doesn't even factor in all the Apple Watch units that are in use, which realistically, is probably 125 - 150 million units. Does that mean AVP or headsets like it won't ever achieve Apple Watch-like sales or adoption? Not at all. But it certainly isn't now and it's probably doing the category a disservice to expect it to reach those heights anytime soon, let alone pretend that just because awareness is super high that sales are guaranteed to follow. [1]: https://www.idc.com/promo/arvr [2]: https://medium.com/@mingchikuo/apple-watch-estimates-and-predictions-a…

FTA: Apple has cut its 2024 Vision Pro shipments to 400–450k units (vs. market consensus of 700–800k units or more). I would want to see references for that “market consensus of 700–800k units or more”. This blogger doesn’t seem to have mentioned that before. Same person, two months ago (https://medium.com/@mingchikuo/vision-pro更新-美國市場需求已大幅放緩-全球發佈時程預測-供應鏈擴產… U.S. shipments are expected to be 200,000–250,000 units this year, better than Apple’s original estimate of 150,000–200,000 units And three months go (https://medium.com/@mingchikuo/vision-pro首週末預購檢視-符合預期但隱憂浮現-vision-pros… Achieving a shipment volume of 500,000 units for Vision Pro this year should not be challenging

iphone sold 6.1m units in 2007 when it launched, there was initial skepticism but they never downgraded their manufacturing because demand was too low. In contrast Vision pro is expected to sell 450k units this year. https://medium.com/@mingchikuo/apple-cuts-2024-2025-vision-pro-shipmen… AVP is cool, but it suffers from a lot of the same problems as traditional VR. Im happy we have it as a devkit available to us

> Apple has very little to do with the AI hype The AI Hype is boosting all large tech players because investors think they will be in a good position to benefit from it. It's rumoured/estimated that their AI hardware spending will be over $4Billion next year [1]. I would guess that at some point Apple will release a better Siri or an iPhone with onboard hardware for local LLM capabilities, or whatever to compete with MS at some point. [1] https://medium.com/@mingchikuo/how-much-does-apple-need-to-invest-annu…

The submission title has almost nothing to do with the meat of the announcement. This unfortunately is buried in a link from a tweet, quoted by another tweet, about 2-3x past the threshold of effort most people put into reading to get to the point. This is a manufacturer of stainless steel battery cases announcing Apple will use them for the battery in the iPhone 16 [0]. > Sunway is a major supplier of stainless steel battery cases. > Apple uses the stainless steel battery case for the first time as a thermal solution > Looking forward to 2025, if all 2H25 new iPhones adopt this new design [0] https://medium.com/@mingchikuo/%E4%BF%A1%E7%B6%AD%E9%80%9A%E4%BF%A1%E7…