8.7 million Oculus were sold in 2021.
5 million PlayStation VR’s have been sold.

97 billion is the projection for the value of augmented and virtual reality as an industry by 2025.

It’s right now rumored that Apple plans on launching a VR/AR headset by January of 2023, but here’s why I’m not sold that’ll happen and why it actually goes against Apple’s business model.

Looking at Apple as a company, there’s really been the following moments in product categories they dominated.

The release of the Apple 2 in 1977.
The release of the iPod in 2001.
The MacBook in 2006.
The iPhone in 2007.
The iPad in 2010.
The Apple Watch in 2015.
AirPods in 2016.

Looking at the release of every product, here’s a timeline.

The Apple 2-Personal computers

The first PC introduced was the Altair 8800 in 1974, which sold 25,000 units.

There were also two other PC’s that launched in 1977, with the Commodore PET and the Tandy TRS-80.

Commodore sold 219,000 units.
Tandy sold 100,000 of the original.

The Apple 2 won, selling 4.8 million units, which was amazing, because it was the least funded and also last to formally release.

Next up, the iPod, which was digital music.

The first MP3 player was the MPMan F10.

There were also dozens of other electronics companies that popped up making products such as WinAmp and others.

There was also a 20+ year history of the Walkman by Sony, which sold 400 million units globally for portable music pre computers.

Again, the iPod won and came late.

There is the MacBook, which wasn’t close to being the first laptop.

Dell introduced laptop in 1990 and almost every other computer brand was way ahead of Apple.

Apple released the MacBook late with the highest margin laptop and has since release and has sold hundreds of millions of units.

iPhone is number four.

The BlackBerry came out in 1999 and a wave of early smartphones came years before Apple.

BlackBerry was also huge, where over 100 million units were sold.

Every single one of those have been completely destroyed since the release of the iPhone.

Tablets are number five and again, tons of people came first.

The Nokia N800
MeeGo, which was again a Nokia product.
WebOS, which was done with Palm Inc.

All existed pre iPad.

Next, the Apple Watch.

Pebble was the biggest Kickstarter campaign of 2013 and many companies had smart watches.

Finally AirPods,

Every headphone maker had a similar product at the time.

So what does this mean for Apple and VR/AR.

Virtual reality is still an industry figuring itself out and while sales are strong for Facebook with Oculus, it hasn’t had enough time to decide between fad and stable product.

Since the boom of Apple, everyone has tried to write a business plan for Apple.

Launching an electric car…
Buying a ton of companies…
Launching a TV or gaming console…

All lower margin and riskier options, which they rejected.

For VR, I feel it’ll be something that happens, but probably when the market is more mature.