Birthday cakes are on the menu at Cupertino today as Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL, ETR:APC) celebrates 40 years of the first Macintosh personal computer.
A lumbering grey box, replete with 128 entire kilobytes of random access memory and a slot for firing up fancy 3.5’ floppy disks, the Apple Macintosh 128K was a technological marvel at the time, setting the benchmark for desktop computing in the mid-80s.
Fast forward to 40 years today, and Apple may have something else to celebrate.
According to analysis provided by Wedbush, the Apple Vision Pro augmented reality headset secured approximately 180,000 preorders over the weekend, far outstripping Street expectations of less than 80,000 units.
Why was this surprising?
Despite the Vision Pro garnering similarly astonished reactions to the 128K for its cutting-edge approach to spatial computing, there was a genuine air of anxiousness before preorders went live last Friday.
Its $3,499 starting price caused audible shocked reactions at last year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, while its two-hour battery life was also met with ridicule.
But hands-on reactions soon emerged, with users praising the headset’s eye-tracking technology and spatial video display as the stuff of the future, even if its bulky design caused neck strain.
These concerns soon emerged as a pain in the neck for Apple, too, with its share price drastically underperforming against the rest of the Magnificent Seven set in recent quarters.
But the Vision Pro appears to have found robust early demand, with Wedbush upping its 2024 unit guidance from 460,000 to 600,000.
“The official launch date for Vision Pro is next Friday, February 2nd with demos kicking off in Apple stores which should generate incremental interest from Apple loyalists, power users, developers, and technologists globally,” said Wedbush.
“Right now there are roughly 230 native apps on the Vision Pro platform and we would expect this number to double to close to 500 apps by the summer as more developers head down this path for AR/VR.”
“This is just the start for Vision Pro,” said analysts, predicting cheaper models and less cumbersome form factors down the line.
“For Apple the ultimate goal in our opinion is that Vision Pro will work alongside the iPhone and other Apple devices over the coming years with many consumer AI use cases set to explode across health, fitness, sports content, and autonomous.
“While many on the Street are dismissing Vision Pro as noise, we strongly disagree and believe its the first step towards a much broader technology vision that Cook & Co plan to push to its golden Cupertino installed base over the coming years.”
Whether or not the Vision Pro ultimately revolutionises computing as we know it remains to be seen.
The iPad proved that the Cupertino megacap has the power to convince the public to buy things they previously didn’t know they needed.
But Apple has found itself on the rare backfoot this decade, as old-school rival Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s first-mover advantage in the nascent artificial intelligence space, via its 50% ownership of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, puts Apple’s status as the world’s most valuable company on the line.
2024 is emerging as a pivotal moment for Silicon Valley’s oldest rivalry.