Apple’s Vision Pro will go on sale outside the US for the first time

Apple’s Vision Pro headset goes on sale outside the US today for the first time, in the first of two waves of expanded availability.

The $3,499 “spatial computing” device was launched in February in the US, but it hasn’t revolutionized the technology world. Part of this was to launch at a regional level, where some of the largest markets still lack access.

Apple announced that the product will be sold internationally during its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote earlier this month.

The first new markets to receive Vision Pro shipments are China, Japan and Singapore, which are the markets in which the product went on sale today.

The second wave will come on July 12, with the headset launching in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the UK.

When we first tested the Vision Pro in February, we wrote that it was a technically impressive device that had a lot of untapped potential. It works very well as a personal entertainment device for frequent travelers, in particular. However, its productivity and gaming applications still need to expand to justify the higher price.

Of course, there have been conflicting rumors recently about how expensive Apple plans to keep its mixed reality hardware. One report claimed that the company has shelved a new version of the Vision Pro for now, opting instead to develop a cheaper alternative for release in 2025.

But another report in Bloomberg suggested that this was an exaggeration. It simply noted that the Vision Pro 2 was slightly delayed from its original target launch date and said that the cheaper model would come first.

In any case, availability will have to expand and prices will eventually come down if augmented reality is able to become the major revolution in computing that Apple CEO Tim Cook has predicted. This international launch is the next step to test whether there is a market for this.