Apple increased the price of many of its products, including the Vision Pro headset, which now starts at $3700.
The Apple Vision Pro (M5) price increases are as follows:
- 256GB: $3499 –> $3699 (a $200 increase)
- 512GB: $3699 –> $3899 (a $200 increase)
- 1TB: $3899 –> $4199 (a $300 increase)
Those are eye-watering price hikes for what was already an incredibly expensive headset. Whereas we once hoped for more affordable Vision headsets to have slashed the entry price of visionOS by now, we’re instead in a much darker timeline where the cost is going up.
Apple applied similar price increases to its Macs, iPads, and HomePod speakers.
No, Apple Didn’t Cancel The Vision Headset Line Forever – Here’s What’s Happening
Multiple reports this year claimed that Apple, and particularly its incoming CEO John Ternus, has canceled the Vision headset line altogether. But that just isn’t true.
Outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook blamed the price increases on the global memory crisis, telling The Wall Street Journal that it’s a situation unlike anything he’s ever seen in his 40 years in the tech industry.
If you’re unfamiliar with the situation: the enormous demand for server-side inference of AI frontier models is far outpacing the global supply capacity of RAM chips, leading to a massive increase in their price.
A similar situation is happening for storage, given that agentic AI systems are generating and storing data at an unprecedented rate.
Meta Is Increasing The Price Of Quest 3 & Quest 3S
Meta is increasing the price of Quest 3 to $600 and Quest 3S to $350, citing the global memory chip crisis that has seen other tech prices rise.
Apple is far from the only tech company to increase its prices due to the crisis, and in fact was one of the main holdouts until now.
Sony has raised the price of PlayStation 5 consoles multiple times over the past year, while Microsoft has done the same for Xbox, and Meta even increased the price of Quest 3 and Quest 3S in April.
Earlier this week, Valve opened reservations for its hotly anticipated Steam Machine consolized PC, announcing a poorly received $1050 starting price that it also says is driven by the memory crisis. Estimates suggest it would have landed around $750 under original component costs.
Valve To “Revisit” Steam Frame Shipping Schedule & Pricing
Valve says it needs to “revisit” its “exact shipping schedule and pricing” for Steam Frame and Steam Machine amid the global memory shortage.
Valve is expected to launch its Steam Frame headset sometime in the next few weeks, recently confirming that it will launch “this summer”, and it too will be affected by the crisis.
When revealing Steam Frame back in November, Valve told UploadVR it was “aiming” to sell it for less than the $1000 Index full-kit, but it’s unclear whether the company can still hit that target.
When Will This End!?
Unfortunately, the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better.
As advanced AI agents that run in loops for minutes or even hours become more capable and therefore more widely used, the memory requirements of the industry are set to increase exponentially.
Memory manufacturers like SK Hynix and Micron are urgently working to scale up production, of course but this will take years, and demand will significantly outpace supply during this time.
As such, it’s likely we’ll continue to see consumer technology increase in price through 2027, and relief, if it does happen, won’t arrive until 2028 at the earliest. Expect this to impact Meta’s next headset too, as well as any other new entrants to the standalone XR market for the next two years at least.
The age of low-cost consumer hardware is over. At least for now.
