Apple has made a quiet, tactical retreat from augmented and virtual reality, scaling back production of its $3,500 Vision Pro headset.

One employee at Chinese manufacturer Luxshare — which is under contract to perform the final assembly for Vision Pro — revealed that the tech giant informed them that manufacturing of the product may need to 'wind down' by November's end.  

Luxshare, according to this source, has already cut assembly rates in half: putting together about 1,000 Vision Pro units/day, down from a high of 2,000 units/day.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, however, has put on a brave face, saying that the $3,500 AR-goggles simply are 'not a mass-market product.' 

'Right now, it's an early-adopter product,' Cook said late last month, in a sprawling interview. 

'People who want to have tomorrow's technology today—that's who it's for. Fortunately, there's enough people who are in that camp that it's exciting.'

In fact, industry analysts at Counterpoint Research estimate that Apple only sold around 370,000 of its Vision Pro headsets in the first three quarters of 2024, figures dwarfed by the millions of cheaper Quest headsets sold by its rival Meta.

And with the holiday season fast approaching, their analysts see no signs of improvement, predicting only 50,000 or so more Vision Pro's will be sold this year.

By contrast, Facebook's parent company Meta sold roughly six million Quest 2 headsets and about three million of its next-gen Quest 3s in the first three quarters of after they were first introduced, according to Counterpoint.

Meta's Quest 3 costs $500, thousands less that the Vision Pro.

'Obviously I'd like to sell more,' Cook told the Wall Street Journal in October.

'I'd always like to sell more of everything,' he explained, 'because ultimately, we want our products to be in as many people's hands as possible.' 

Cook, who also said he uses the futuristic Vision Pro everyday, described the device's launch as a success simply by getting a first product to market that software developers and app makers can now work with to make new products.

'I think it's just arguably a success today from an ecosystem-being-built-out point of view,' Cook said.

'Over time, everything gets better,' he added, 'and it too will have its course of getting better and better.' 

'It doesn't occur overnight,' Cook noted, likening the Vision Pro's slow roll-out to the early days of the iPod, the iPhone and Airpods. 'None of these did.'

But it's clear from the company's revised plans for a second model of the Vision Pro, that there was disappointment over the low sales of this revolutionary new headset — a 'spatial computing' console meant to replace desktops and laptops. 

That retreat was first reported this June by The Information, who learned that Apple was pivoting to work on a more affordable Vision goggles product with fewer features, hoping to release this budget model sometime before the end of 2025.

Development on a true second generation version of the higher-end headset, tentatively titled the Vision Pro 2, had been suspended, the tech news site reported.

Elsewhere in Apple's supply chain for the Vision Pro, some factory employees have reported that manufacture of the device's internal components had already halted back in May.

Anonymous sources at three suppliers working within Apple's pipeline have currently built enough parts to make between 500,000 and 600,000 Vision Pro headsets.

Apple had previously told one of its suppliers to anticipate a production load of components needed for approximately 8 million Vision Pros over the devices entire lifespan, according to The Information.

However, the Cupertino-based tech giant appears to have revised that expectation down, telling at least one supplier to expect to work building components for just 4 million units over the entire lifespan of the cheaper Vision Pro, code-named N109.

Die-hard Apple fans online have remained bullshit on the Vision Pro, likening its price tag less to luxury toy status and more to the historic price of true innovation.  

One poster to Reddit's r/VisionPro forum noted that the original Apple desktop computer, the Macintosh 128K, cost roughly $7,300 adjusted for inflation back when it was released on January 24, 1984.

'The original Macintosh was a $7000 (in today's dollars) piece of consumer tech that kind of changed the world,' the fan, a Vision Pro owner argued. 

'It had too little memory, hardly enough space on its single 400KB floppy drive, and didn't really take off until the LaserWriter was introduced,' the added. 'Now look.'

'I got the same feelings with the Vision Pro that I got with that first limited little Mac.'

DailyMail.com has reached out to Apple for comment, and will update this article, if the iPhone maker responds.