Apple's Next Vision Pro Is Still Years Away, Gurman Reports
Late 2028 at the earliest. That is the timeline Bloomberg's Mark Gurman is now attaching to the next major Apple Vision Pro headset — a span that would place the device more than five years after the original launched at $3,499 in February 2024. Gurman, whose track record on Apple hardware leaks has made his Power On newsletter essential reading for anyone who follows the company closely, reported this week that Apple is actively exploring a "completely revamped" successor, internally codenamed N224, but that a consumer release before late 2028 or early 2029 is unlikely.
The original Vision Pro arrived with enormous fanfare and a price tag that put it out of reach for most consumers. By Apple's own tightly-guarded sales standards, the headset moved slowly — analyst estimates placed first-year shipments well below a million units globally, a stark contrast to the iPhone's usual cadence. Apple never confirmed specific figures, but the company quietly scaled back production volumes, a signal the market was not absorbing the product at the pace the company had hoped. The $3,499 starting price, combined with a relatively short battery life tethered to an external pack, made the Vision Pro a compelling developer and enterprise tool rather than the mass-market platform Apple ultimately envisions.
Against that backdrop, Gurman's latest dispatch is not a surprise. What makes it significant is the specificity: four distinct design directions, internal debate about form factor, and a timeline that suggests Apple is treating this iteration as a genuine architectural reset rather than an incremental revision.
Four Radically Different Design Concepts Under Consideration
The detail that will dominate discussion among Apple observers is the sheer divergence of the concepts Apple's Vision team is reportedly evaluating. According to Gurman's Power On newsletter, the N224 program encompasses four meaningfully different design philosophies — not four color options or processor configurations, but fundamentally different answers to the question of what a second-generation spatial computing device should be.
Read next iPhone Duo's Hidden Fake Bezel Setting ExplainedGurman did not enumerate all four directions in granular detail, but one of them borrows directly from the approach Meta is taking with its upcoming VR Glasses: offloading compute and battery hardware into a separate external module. On Meta's device, that module is designed to clip to the user's waist, keeping weight off the face while maintaining wireless or wired connectivity to the optics. Gurman, who has reportedly previewed Meta's headset firsthand, described the external puck as roughly comparable in size and weight to the battery pack that ships with the current Vision Pro — with a grippy texture that signals it is meant to be handled and worn rather than tucked away.
The idea has intuitive appeal. One of the consistent criticisms directed at the original Vision Pro is that wearing it for extended periods is fatiguing. Moving a processor and battery off the user's face reduces thermal load and redistributes mass, potentially enabling a front unit that is dramatically lighter. For a device positioned as a productivity tool — something a knowledge worker might keep on for a two-hour collaboration session — that tradeoff could be compelling.
But Apple's internal consensus, as Gurman tells it, is skeptical. Senior decision-makers at the company apparently view the external puck concept as a "poor user experience" and prefer an approach that keeps the Apple Vision Pro 2 closer to a self-contained, all-in-one design. That tension — engineering pragmatism pulling toward a puck, design philosophy pulling toward integration — is exactly the kind of internal debate that can extend a product cycle by years. The fact that four concepts are still on the table this far from an anticipated launch date suggests the team has not yet converged on an answer.
How Meta's VR Glasses Compare to Apple's Direction
Meta's approach to the external module is worth examining closely, because Apple is clearly aware of it — Gurman would not have described it in detail if Apple's own engineers weren't using it as a reference point. Meta's VR Glasses, expected to launch in spring 2027, represent the company's attempt to push into premium spatial computing by solving the weight problem differently than Apple did.
The waist-clip form factor is not new in concept. Older augmented reality headsets from enterprise vendors like Vuzix and Epson used belt-worn compute packs a decade ago. What Meta is attempting is to make that architecture feel consumer-friendly rather than utilitarian — hence the grippy finish Gurman noted, which reads as deliberate product design rather than an afterthought. If Meta executes well, it will ship a device that is noticeably lighter on the face than the Vision Pro while delivering comparable or superior performance.
Apple's resistance to that path is revealing. The company's design culture, shaped over decades of Steve Jobs-era thinking, prizes integration. The original iPod had no external accessories required. The iPhone does not ask you to clip a modem to your belt. Apple's identity is bound up in the idea that great hardware is a complete, closed system. Departing from that principle for Vision Pro would require senior leadership to accept that spatial computing is categorically different from smartphones — that it demands a different contract with the user's body.
That debate appears unresolved. And until it is, Apple Vision Pro 2 development will continue exploring all four paths.
What This Means for the Current Vision Pro and Buyers Today
Gurman's reporting also clarified something that had been ambiguous since his earlier dispatches: the N224 program is distinct from a separate, cheaper and lighter headset that Apple is also reportedly developing. In June 2026, Gurman reported that Apple was working on a more accessible successor to the Vision Pro — a device aimed at broadening the headset's appeal beyond the professional and early-adopter segments that defined the first generation's customer base. That cheaper device is a separate project from the revamped N224 flagship.
For anyone who owns a current Vision Pro, or is considering buying one, the practical implication is a long wait before any meaningful hardware upgrade arrives. Software support will continue — visionOS has been on a consistent annual update cycle — but the hardware platform will age without a near-term refresh. Buyers today are purchasing a first-generation product that Apple itself is apparently reimagining from the ground up.
That is not necessarily a reason to avoid the current Vision Pro for users with specific needs. Enterprise customers using it for surgical planning, immersive training, or remote collaboration have found genuine workflows where the device earns its price. Developers building for the visionOS platform have no choice but to work with current hardware. But for consumers hoping to wait out a second-generation device with resolved ergonomics and a lower price point, the 2028–29 window Gurman is reporting is a long horizon.
The Bigger Picture: Apple's Spatial Computing Strategy
Apple shipped the original Vision Pro in 2024 without a clear mass-market adoption curve — a deliberate move that CEO Tim Cook described as the beginning of a spatial computing era, not the completion of one. Gurman's latest reporting confirms that Apple's internal posture matches that framing: the company is in no rush to ship an Apple Vision Pro 2 until it is certain about the form factor.
That patience is consistent with how Apple has approached category-defining products before. The first iPhone was followed by the iPhone 3G, which added cellular data and slashed the price — a two-year cycle that drove mass adoption. But Vision Pro's challenges are more structural than a missing radio. The company is grappling with fundamental questions about how much weight belongs on a human face, how social acceptance of headworn computers evolves, and whether the spatial computing metaphor resonates broadly once the novelty fades.
Four competing design concepts and a 2028–29 window suggests Apple is genuinely uncertain — and is giving itself the runway to figure it out. In a market where Meta is moving fast and the enterprise AR space is fragmenting across dozens of competing platforms, that patience carries real risk. But shipping the wrong form factor at scale, with Apple's margin structure and brand expectations, would be more damaging than taking time to get it right.
Gurman has been the most reliable source on Apple's hardware roadmap for the better part of a decade. When he says next-generation Vision Pro is still two to three years away, that is the closest thing available to an informed forecast. What shape it ultimately takes — all-in-one or puck-assisted, lightweight or powerful, affordable or premium — remains genuinely open. The next chapter of Apple's most ambitious hardware bet is still being written.
