Apple Slashes Vision Pro Production, Amid Poor Holiday Sales

Last updated: 2026/01/04 at 9:31 AM

News Room Published 4 January 2026

If the Apple Vision Pro’s $3,500 retail price tag or its potentially neck-straining weight put you off nabbing one this holiday season, well, you probably weren’t the only one in that boat.

Analyst house IDC estimated Apple shipped just 45,000 new units of the headset in the final quarter of 2025, while reporting very healthy sales of iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks over the same period. Production is also allegedly being cut back, with Apple’s Chinese manufacturing partner Luxshare halting production of the high-end headset at the start of 2025, according to The Financial Times, which first reported the research.

The consumer tech giant is also investing less in marketing the Vision Pro to the public. The Financial Times highlighted figures from the market intelligence group Sensor Tower, which estimated that Apple slashed digital advertising spending for the headset by more than 95 percent year-over-year in key markets such as the US and UK.

The news of the poor sales comes despite Apple rolling out an updated version of the advanced headset in October, featuring the new M5 chip, which powers the latest iPad Pro and MacBook Pro. This gave the newest iteration of the Vision Pro a significant improvement in processing power compared to the three-year-old M2 chip in the original Vision Pro.

But the Vision Pro’s poor sales may not solely be an Apple issue. The total market for virtual reality headsets fell 14 per cent year on year, according to a report by Counterpoint Research, highlighted by the FT. Meta’s Quest headset line-up dominated the market, with an 80% share.

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Apple could be turning its attention to other areas. Rumours from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman surfaced in October last year of employees moving from working on a sequel to the Vision Pro to Apple’s smart glasses.

Even if the current demand for VR headsets isn’t exactly breaking records, that hasn’t stopped new major players entering the market. Samsung’s Galaxy XR mixed-reality headset was released in October 2025, offering some advanced and broadly comparable features at a significantly lower $1,799 price tag. Samsung’s headset was the first to use Google’s Android XR platform, which Google hopes will one day dominate the VR headset and smart glasses market, like Android does for smartphones.