Last week, Bloomberg News‘ Mark Gurman reported that Apple demonstrated an AR/VR, or mixed-reality, headset to its board of directors and has a “consumer release planned for 2023.” Whenever Apple’s headset is released, the company is well-placed to win the mixed-reality battle.
Trung Phan for Bloomberg Opinion:
Sales of Meta’s Quest 2 hit 8.7 million units in 2021, twice as much as in the prior year, and the company owns 80% of the market.
The Quest 2 sales figure is a drop in the wearables hardware bucket compared with what Apple has been able to move, though. According to Apple analyst Neil Cybart, the iPhone maker shipped more than 100 million wearables (Apple Watch, AirPods and Beats headphones) in 2021, an increase of 4x from 2017. Also, don’t forget the 233 million iPhones it shipped last year.
No other company can move high-end consumer hardware at Apple’s scale.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple has the custom silicon. Apple has the installed base. Apple has the ecosystem. Apple has the services. Apple will have the profitable portion of the mixed-reality headset market. And then, a few years later, Apple will take the profitable portion of the smartglasses (AR) market, too.
And some people will slap their foreheads and lament, “I could’ve bought Apple shares under $140!”
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