I never heard anyone complain the original vision pro was "slow", so why are they adding a faster chip?
I can't imagine. Spending more money on Vision Pro hardware right now seems like throwing good money after bad. For most users, Vision Pro is a fun toy, and an expensive one at that. Toys don't get upgraded very often even if they work well and are frequently used. Unfortunately for Apple, surveys show that users aren't using them very much at all, and there's no reason to believe that CPU speed has anything to do with the lack of use, which means you should expect nearly zero upgrades unless Apple takes a cue from the PC playbook and makes them connector-compatible with the existing design so that users can bring them into an Apple retail store and get a $500 main board swap. And even then, upgrades would be a hard sell.
Similarly, users who don't own one are not going to be persuaded to buy one because the new version is faster. Cutting a zero off the price, yeah, but faster, no.
What Apple should do is focus on making the software and user interface not suck. Once they get it to that point and sales start to pick up, *then* start thinking about a new version with a faster CPU. For starters, what we want to see is:
- 100% compatibility with iOS apps (and remove the option to not make apps available on Vision Pro)
- 100% compatibility with Mac apps
- Virtual keyboard that supports touch typing (probably using a fair bit of AI to figure out what is likely being typed)
Get those three things, and the platform will be an immediate success. As long as doing any meaningful work with the device requires being tethered to a physical keyboard, which completely defeats the purpose of using a headset, and as long as a significant number of apps that you might want to run cannot be used at all without being tethered to a Mac, any marketing claims of it being a "spatial computer" are rather comically aspirational, to the point of being an outright lie.
Alternatively, Apple could try to make Vision Pro compete with Oculus by throwing money at the gaming industry in one form or another, but that will still have a pretty limited market, and would require Apple acknowledging that it's really just a high-end gaming headset, so I wouldn't hold my breath. Oh, and you'd probably need controllers to make that work well, so that would be a pretty big pivot.
And of course, Apple could also pivot by acknowledging that Vision Pro was the wrong approach for augmented reality and take a cue from Android XR instead of Oculus, by building an iOS-compatible eyewear fashion accessory that provides a HUD rather than a full active blending of reality with computer-generated content, and supports a more modest feature set, such as real-time text translation, reminding you of people's names and recent conversations, highlighting foods it thinks you might like on restaurant menus, providing access to email and text messages without whipping out your phone, letting you watch movies while out for a walk, etc.
None of these things involve taking Vision Pro and giving it a faster CPU, though. That's just pouring money down the drain. The only rational reason to do that would be if they're going to run into contractual costs related to continuing to build the M2 chip in small quantities and if the R&D costs for doing the board rev are less than the projected annual cost of continuing to make (or stockpile) the old chips. This seems unlikely to me, but I'm willing to acknowledge that it is a possibility.