Apple unveiled its long-awaited “mixed reality” headset on Monday, in its most anticipated hardware product launch since Steve Jobs revealed the iPad in 2010.
The gadget, called Vision Pro, will be available “early next year”. It combines virtual reality with augmented reality, which overlays digital images on top of the real world. Apple said it would sell for $3,499, even more than most analysts had expected and nearly 12 times the price of Meta’s Quest 2, the biggest-selling VR headset.
The Vision Pro is the biggest gamble on a product yet from chief executive Tim Cook, who took over from Steve Jobs in 2011. Cook has long been hailed as an operations genius who took Apple’s market value up from about $350bn in 2011 to nearly $2.9tn currently, but he has long been criticised for iterating on past ideas and delaying projects such as the Apple Car.