The successor to Apple's Vision Pro headset will enter mass production next year and may feature the yet-to-be-announced M5 chipset The design is said to be nearly identical and the price will be about the same, but could be lower This is according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who says that the real selling point of Apple's next headset will be the integration of Apple Intelligence

Kuo cannot predict whether Apple Intelligence will be available in the current Apple Vision Pro, which runs on the M2 chip The existing headset has a 16-core Neural Engine and 16GB of RAM, which technically allows for Apple's series of artificial intelligence upgrades And given the Vision Pro's suggested price of $3,499, it would be churlish for Apple not to make it available

This price is definitely a barrier to entry Kuo is rather vague here, stating that “other hardware specs and design will not change much, which should help bring the cost and price point down”

According to Kuo, the jump from M2 to M5 will allow Vision Pro 2 to offer the “best Apple Intelligence user experience” Furthermore, the analyst suggests that AI will be the key to accelerating adoption rates because it will ultimately provide an innovative user experience [If the M5 Vision Pro can integrate something like OpenAI's Sora, it could take the user experience of head-mounted display devices to unimaginable levels,” Kuo said

Analysts have stopped short of predicting the actual release date of the next-generation device However, the start of mass production next year would mean that an announcement in September or October 2025 is very likely A more likely timeline, however, is that Apple will not reveal the Vision Pro 2 until WWDC in June 2026

In the meantime, however, Apple's competitors will not stand still In fact, Meta just announced a prototype of AR glasses called Meta Orion, which, in the words of Mark Spoonauer, global editor-in-chief of Tom's Guide, may not only blow away the Apple Vision Pro, but also bring the iPhone to attention