Apple Vision Pro Will Require In-Store Appointments, Report Says

When Apple releases its Vision Pro headset early next year, you may need to jump through some hoops to acquire one. The rollout for the $3,499 Vision Pro will start with in-store fittings and appointment-only purchases in select US stores, Bloomberg reported on Friday.

The reported plan is in line with the company's Apple Watch rollout in 2015, with the goal of providing customers with the proper fit before they leave an Apple store. Apple reportedly plans to host in-store demos and offer tools for resizing the headset strap. The Vision Pro can also be tailored to a person's eye prescription through Zeiss custom inserts. 

The rollout will reportedly begin in US stores in big cities, like New York and Los Angeles. 

While the Vision Pro will be sold through Apple's web store in 2024, the in-store purchase and fitting rollout means that the company isn't planning on partnering with third-party resellers until at least 2025, Bloomberg reported. That means you probably won't be ordering a Vision Pro through Amazon or another big box retailer for at least a year into the headset's market debut.

When CNET's Scott Stein tried out the headset at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June he praised its passthrough video camera quality and said its eye-tracking features were "transformative." He even got the chance to watch part of Avatar: The Way of Water in the headset and complemented its "vivid" cinematic fidelity. 

At $3,499, the Vision Pro may be too expensive for the average consumer -- even though the high price makes more sense when you compare the years of research that went into the headset and its comparability in price to a high-end MacBook. The headset is more expensive than Meta's Quest Pro, at $1,000, and Sony's PlayStation VR 2, at $550. 

Read more: Best VR Headsets of 2023

Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.