Rumor | Apple Vision Pro to be sold in-store "by appointment"

Apple's plans to ship what may have been a million units of its inaugural Vision Pro have reportedly been slashed to less than half that number, leaving the California-based behemoth with an estimated 400,000 M2-powered XR headsets to sell.

Then again, the OEM could turn this potential setback into an asset, particularly should Mark Gurman's new projection of how it will be sold pan out. The Bloomberg contributor claims to have heard that the inaugural headsets will be sold "by appointment".

The process apparently entails the necessity of a trip to a buyer's most local Apple Store to pick their unit up, which could presumably involve a one-on-one tutorial in how to use visionOS, not to mention a practically bespoke 'fitting' for the device - which might indeed be necessary to get features such as EyeSight working properly, not to mention its gesture-based navigation system and immersive content-consumption.

Then again, buyers will still probably be able to get their Vision Pro online instead. However, Apple might tout an in-person purchase as the way to get the most out of the new kind of wearable, as it did when it started to sell the first-gen Watch back in 2015.

This in-person sales model is said to be available in the US only on the headset's release in 2024 at a price of US$3,499, with availability set to expand to the UK and Canada, followed by markets such as Australia, France, Hong Kong, Japan, mainland China and South Korea over time.

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