Apple has sharply reduced production of its Vision Pro mixed reality headset, according to a new report from The Information. According to what the publication calls “several people directly involved in manufacturing components for the device,” the Cupertino company may stop manufacturing the headset as early as November.

This follows a Wall Street Journal interview in which Apple CEO Tim Cook admitted that the headset is failing.

“At $3,500, it's not a mass-market product,” Cook told the WSJ's Ben Cohen. 'Right now it's a product for early adopters. Right now, it's a product for early adopters. People who want tomorrow's technology today, that's the product. Fortunately, there are enough of those people that it's exciting.”

The report is controversial and suggests that the production cutbacks suggest that Apple has enough inventory to meet the projected demand for the headset. This coincides with news that Apple has halted work on the second generation of the Vision Pro due to weak sales.

Apple is reportedly working on a less expensive model that may be released next year, but is said to cost $2,000, which may not be enough to attract consumer attention.

According to The Information, Apple's suppliers have enough parts to produce between 500,000 and 600,000 headsets, and employees of at least one supplier claim that their company has not produced any new parts since May.

Apple has sold 370,000 headsets this year and is allegedly set to sell only 50,000 more by the end of the year.

Apple told one of its suppliers in November that it needed to scale back production. That company, Luxshare, reportedly manufactures 1,000 Vision Pro headsets a day, half of its peak production.

Meanwhile, Apple's biggest competitor in this field, Meta, introduced its new entry-level Meta Quest 3S at the end of September. Even the more powerful Meta Quest 3 starts at $499, a little over 85% cheaper than the Vision Pro. Incidentally, according to AR Insider, Meta sold nearly 3 million Quest 3 headsets in the first three quarters after its launch; the Quest 3S has only just been launched, so its sales data cannot be estimated.

As Cook said in an interview with the WSJ, the company wants to embody the “not first, but best” philosophy, but the Vision Pro is one of the biggest gambles in recent Apple history. This is what he said about Apple's delay in including artificial intelligence capabilities in its devices.

“We're perfectly fine with not being first,” Cook told the Journal. 'After all, it takes time to get something really great. It takes a lot of iterations. It takes a lot of attention to detail. Sometimes that takes a little time. We'd rather get those products out there and help people than run around trying to get something out there first. If we can do both, great. But if you can only do one or the other, then you're wrong, because if you talk to 100 people, 100 people will say: do your best.”

Does this mean that Apple will continue to iterate on Vision Pro to make the “best” headset? Time will tell, and we will know when a less expensive model is released next year, as has been reported.