According to the latest analysis and forecast released by renowned Apple industry chain analyst Guo Minggui, Android inventory replenishment, Apple Vision Pro, and AI PC/mobile phones are the three key investment trends in the consumer electronics industry in 2024.
Guo Minggui believes that Vision Pro is Apple's most important product for 2024. He expects Vision Pro to ship approximately 500000 units in 2024. At present, Vision Pro has been put into mass production and is expected to start mass shipping in the first week of January 2024. Based on the current large shipment schedule, Apple is most likely to release the Vision Pro by the end of January or early February 2024.
Guo Minggui stated that if users respond better than expected to Vision Pro, it will strengthen the market consensus that Vision Pro is the next star consumer electronics product and boost the stock prices of related supply chain companies.
In early June 2023, Apple unveiled its highly anticipated first MR (mixed reality) device, Vision Pro, at the Global Developers Conference. Apple defines it as a "space computing device" with a starting price of $3499 and promises to launch it in early 2024.
It is reported that Vision Pro breaks through the limitations of traditional displays by creating a borderless canvas for the app. Users gain a brand new 3D interactive experience through their eyes, hands, and voice control, making digital content feel like it exists in the real world. The breakthrough design of Vision Pro includes an ultra-high resolution display system that places 23 million pixels in two displays and a customized Apple chip with a unique dual chip design.
"From Apple's financial reports and market environment, there are signs that the influence of the iPhone has peaked, and Apple is looking for new business growth points through the MR device Vision Pro." Liu Yushi, a senior analyst at semiconductor display industry research firm CINNO Research, told reporters that the agency's monitoring data shows that Apple's sales in the domestic mobile phone market in the third quarter of 2023 decreased by 14.2% year-on-year.
However, due to the current incomplete MR industry chain, the performance of MR equipment needs to be improved, product prices are high, and consumers are more rational in purchasing electronic products. Liu Yushi predicts that the shipment volume of Apple Vision Pro will be around 400000 units in 2024. In the future, Apple's MR devices may truly enter the consumer market with iteration and cost reduction, but this cannot be achieved quickly with the first generation products.
Liu Yushi believes that the consumer group in the existing domestic XR (Extended Reality) market is relatively niche, and XR devices are mainly used for immersive viewing, gaming and other entertainment activities. But Apple's MR will focus more on human interaction, breaking the mobility limitations of VR (virtual reality) products with MR forms, expanding usage scenarios through "eye movement+gesture+language" interaction, and promoting the true arrival of the era of spatial computing.
For the XR industry, other XR manufacturers will focus more on technologies adopted by Apple, such as high-performance and high-resolution Micro OLED screens, Pancake optical modules, and multi camera pure visual gesture control solutions, in order to achieve benchmarking with Apple as much as possible. Apple's powerful software and hardware capabilities, abundant development resources, and extensive ecosystem are expected to break through the bottleneck of XR industry development and promote long-term development of the industry.
XR (Extended Reality) includes AR (Augmented Reality), VR (Virtual Reality), and MR (Hybrid Reality), and XR devices are the terminal carriers for users to experience immersive metaverse digital life. However, since the launch of the consumer grade VR device Quest 2 by Meta's Oculus in 2020, which sparked a small wave, VR device shipments have once again entered a downward trend since 2022. The time for Apple to launch MR devices has also been repeatedly delayed.
The latest research report from CITIC Securities believes that Vision Pro has demonstrated the top parameter level in the current consumer electronics field on the hardware side, and is expected to provide a hardware experience that comprehensively surpasses related products on the market. On the software application side, the 3D experience represented by spatial computing is different from the current mainstream 2D screens. It is expected to shape a new paradigm of user interaction from the dimensions of gestures, eye movements, language, etc., and further promote the transformation of software applications and production technology.