As Australia wakes up to the overnight news from WWDC, I’m sure you’ve seen that Apple has announced its AR/VR headset, Vision Pro. It’s a device that is both positioned at the searing technological edge, and also it looks a bit funny and costs way too much.
In the United States, the Vision Pro will carry a price tag of $3,499. At this stage, Apple is only talking about American pricing and an American release — the device will arrive in the US in “early 2024.” Apple says other nations will follow later that year but is not specific about the order of arrival.
This recalls Valve’s approach to its Steam Deck handheld device and its ongoing lack of an official local launch. Australians interested in purchasing the Vision Pro will likely have to do so from the US via a carrier, at least for the first half of 2024 (and there’s no guarantee that Australia will appear near the top of Apple’s list of priority launch markets).
A straight conversion of its US price to Australian dollars puts the Vision Pro somewhere around $5,300. This is, of course, before we apply the good old Australia Tax, which typically inflates the local price well beyond a straight conversion. After conferring with our mates at Gizmodo Australia, our expectation — and this is an educated guess on our part — would be that the Vision Pro lands in Australia at a price somewhere in the region of $AU7,000.
Yep.
So that’s where things stand right now. We don’t know when the Vision Pro is coming to Australia, and we don’t know for sure how much it will cost locally. We’ll be sure to update you when Apple finalises Australian pricing — not so any of us can buy one, of course. Mostly so that we can all come together and wince collectively at the thought of spending that much on a VR headset.
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