The new year has barely begun, and we already have a leading contender for our annual dead tech list, 2026 edition — the Apple Vision Pro.
The iPhone manufacturer’s Augmented Reality (AR) headset has not been officially discontinued. The Apple Vision Pro (starting at $3,499) has, to rephrase Monty Python, merely paused production at its Chinese manufacturer, Luxcorp. Analysts at International Data Corp estimate Apple sold only 4,500 headsets globally in the holiday quarter of 2025 — including the new M5 chip version (allegedly produced in Vietnam).
For perspective, that figure is less than one-tenth of the half-million Vision Pros analysts claim were sold in its inaugural year, 2024.
Apple does not reveal Vision Pro sales numbers, but the company has nearly abandoned efforts to market the product, according to a harsh Financial Times report. Digital marketing for the device has been reduced by 95 percent. If you spot a banner ad for a Vision Pro online, you might want to take a screenshot: You could be looking at an increasingly rare product.
What went awry with the Apple Vision Pro?
To be fair to Apple, dwindling sales are an issue prevalent throughout the entire AR/virtual reality sector — not to mention across the whole U.S. retail space.
Analysts at Counterpoint observed a 14 percent decline in all AR/VR headset sales in the first half of 2025. The Vision Pro is evidently positioned at the high end of the market — Meta’s Quest 3S VR headset recently lowered its price to $250 — and luxury items usually are the first to be dropped when consumers feel the strain of rising costs for essentials like groceries and healthcare premiums.
Even if you are fully onboard with the notion of hefty AR headsets with battery packs attached, you might be tempted to spend half the Vision Pro’s price on the new Galaxy XR headset ($1,800). As impressive as the Vision Pro’s hands-on experience may be, no indispensable “killer app” has yet been recognized for the platform. The iPhone serves as a vital status symbol; the iPad enhances your creative life; your Mac functions as your working machine; and the Vision Pro … does what, precisely?
From the very beginning, the company has had difficulty articulating why we should desire a Vision Pro (as this oddly Black Mirror-esque product demo illustrated). Therefore, it makes sense to halt those advertising expenditures, at least. For those of us who find the Vision Pro’s EyeSight display unsettling, banner ads showcasing the feature may decrease our likelihood of purchasing one.
Apple’s AI glasses represent the future.
Unsatisfactory sales and halted production do not signify that Apple lacks direction in this category. Quite the contrary, according to a well-informed report from October 2025 — the company is reallocating employees from its less expensive Vision Pro version to a lighter, more affordable model of smart glasses that will rival Meta’s AI-powered Ray-Ban Display and Google’s upcoming Android XR glasses.
That approach is much more logical. Despite an extremely awkward Mark Zuckerberg demo failure, the $800 Meta Ray-Bans emerged as one of the more talked-about product launches of 2025. Early adopters and critics were generally positive, and investors rushed to acquire shares in the company producing Ray-Bans.
With features like live translation, navigation, and smart specs, the Meta Ray-Bans delivered on many promises of augmented reality that have persisted since the era of Google Glass (which also took a significant duration to officially phase out); they also just happen to be Ray-Bans, thus avoiding the nerdy appearance. (Well, unless you’re indoors and the stylish shades lighten to reveal, regrettably, thick frames.)
If there’s any company that comprehends the significance of design that resonates with non-nerdy customers, it’s Apple. So while the bulky, expensive, nerdy Vision Pro may be an example of dead tech walking, don’t write off its creator just yet. Apple just might recover from this sales downturn to astonish us with something like a Vision Air — lightweight specs that cater to far more than 45,000 new customers each quarter.