🗿 Apple Vision Pro Flops, Cuts Production

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GM. Go Yankees + RIP Phil Lesh. One last post about Apple Vision Pro (it’s an important update) and a teaser TLDR on stablecoins.

Without Further Ado. ☕ *knuckle cracks* ☕ Let’s get into it.

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Apple Rolls Back Production of Vision Pro

I know it’s my third week in a row since Ad Week talking about Apple Vision Pro … but it’s newsworthy. And will ultimately define spatial computing for the next 2-5 years.

The Information released a report Wednesday released a report Wednesday revealing Apple sharply scaled back new production of the Vision Pro, according to “multiple people directly involved in building components for the device.”

Now. Let’s be careful. We all know the temptation of quick hit journalism. It’s a sexy headline. And largely true.

Articles and comment sections on mainstream pages like Complex are predictably quick to dunk on Apple. “Expensive Tech Toy Fails” “No one wants a $3500 headset to play games.” “Not in this economy.” etc

And that isn't a bad take. The rollback is 100% related to declining sales. If headsets were flying off shelves, Apple would not slow down production (estimates from the summer predicted they may not even hit 500K device sales this year).

But going beyond the botched launch, where does the APV goes from here? Lots of things fail at the first go-around.

There’s speculation that Apple may release a cheaper model ~ around $2,000. That’s more appealing to the mass market, but still an arm’s length away from the $499 Meta Quest (@ Meta can I get an affiliate link or what).

From a pure business POV, I don’t think you can’t outprice something like a Macbook Air – a functional device that people are already comfortable using - for a new product category.

It needs to feel like a Xbox-Macbook-TV-in-one to compete for $3500. And even if it was, most people today would still rather just watch Netflix or sports with family and friends.

There’s an educational perception gap here as well.

To summarize:

• Vision Pro sales were slower than expected

• The main reason seems to be high price point / barrier to entry, especially for a new product category

• Apple is working on a relatively cheaper alternative, likely to position itself for a broader market

• Spatial computing feels inevitable; it’s just very very early.

Special mention: Stripe and stablecoins

Stripe acquired stablecoin platform Bridge this week for over $1B; it’s opened up a broader conversation about the future of stablecoins and how we can enable payments at scale without the involvement of a bank.

This feels like just the beginning.

How can stablecoins be further implemented into tradfi and become an everyday use case for retail banking?

As Bernstein analysts noted, “Bridge plays an important role [in payments] by building API software for businesses to integrate stablecoin payments within their regular payments experience”.

This is probably my favorite genre of fintech and real-world use cases for blockchain. And it’s exciting to see the largest crypto acquisition by a major payments company to date. Will look to dedicate a deeper dive on this next week.

For those who don’t fully understand how stablecoins work, they enable the ability to transact peer to peer, without the involvement of a third party, with a currency backed by stable assets – like the US dollar.

What We’re Reading

• ZachXBT Was Featured in Wired This Week

• Further Reading On Stripe and Stablecoins

• U.S. will be ‘more pro-crypto’ after this election, no matter who wins, says Ripple CEO Garlinghouse

• Meta strikes multi-year AI deal with Reuters For News

• OpenAI plans to release its next big AI model by December

• Pennsylvania House of Representatives Passes Crypto Bill to Bring Regulatory Clarity: Report

• Google unveils invisible ‘watermark’ for AI-generated text

• Can A.I. Be Blamed for a Teen’s Suicide?

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