Ignoring Wall Street, Apple gets busy on Vision Pro 2.0

While politicians everywhere seem to be doing their best to make everything pretty difficult, the North Star for Apple remains what it always has been: creating products people seem to love.

That’s what got the company through (and out of) tough times before. Now, it looks like that might happen again.

The word on Apple speculation street is that the company is moving to build the next generation visionOS device. This is not expected to be the all-in-one, do-everything spectacles we’ve all been hoping for, but should be a faster and somewhat more affordable version of Vision Pro. If we’re honest, all of this is going according to expectation, with a new model of these things anticipated to appeari this fall or in early 2026.

Apple’s enterprise product gets a raise

Citing the usual unnamed shadowy sources, ITHome lays out the following:

• Key components for the new device are already being made, including glass panels and outer shells for the headsets.
• Electronic circuit components are also being made.
• The new model may reuse some of the components of the original Vision Pro.
• The processor will be upgraded from the existing M2 chip.

There is one caveat in that the upgraded model might not be as dramatic an improvement as the market demands; it could be a little cheaper and a little more powerful, but should be seen as an interim release designed to maintain interest in the platform pending a bigger update down the line. Enterprises will love it.

Made in the USA?

With all that, it is hard not to wonder whether there are plans to build these things in the US, given it might be easier and cheaper to build a manufacturing line to handle the scale of Vision Pro demand in the US than it would be to transplant iPhone production there. The latter would take a decade, but demand is lower for Vision devices. 

At least, right now it is.

Adding grist to this particular mill, Apple partner and Vision Pro manufacturer Luxshare is allegedly considering shifting its Apple-related manufacturing for some products to the US as it responds to the Trump tariffs, according to Reuters.

Speaking to analysts, Luxshare Chair Wang Laichun said the company was considering such a move, but warned that actually building new production lines would take at least 12 to 18 months. This doesn’t mean it’s going to make any such move, of course, but the two strands do fit together temptingly well — and a factory churning out a few thousand Vision devices is likely to be a lot smaller and need a lot less human power than a concern pouring out iPhones by the million. Doesn’t mean it will happen, though.

Smart and spatial

One more thing is Apple Intelligence.

While the company has self-inflicted bruises there, it continues working on Apple Intelligence, and — theoretically, at least — it’s plausible to anticipate a brand new Vision Pro unit arriving at around the same time the company’s AI finally gets that contextual intelligence Apple has been working on. Armed with that and the spatial-based user interface of Vision Pro, these systems promise to become highly credible computing devices in their own right. See them as Macs you wear that you can also control with your voice. That was always the direction of travel but add a little agentic AI pixie dust and Apple’s Private Secure Cloud and you might yet find that Vision Pro eventually fills a space far greater and wider than pundits first saw.

While Apple must continue to navigate a grim, grey ocean of economic and political uncertainty, damaging trading conditions, and nightmarishly ill-thought-through regulation, all things do eventually pass. And with folding iPhones and whole new device categories coming down the pipe — along with exciting digital health services, the company may be feeling a little bruised right now, but don’t bet against it quite yet.

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