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A customer tries on the Apple Vision Pro headset during the product launch at an Apple Store in New York City on Feb. 2, 2024.

Angela Weiss | Afp | Getty Images

The Vision Pro, the new virtual reality headset from Apple, can transport you to Hawaii or the surface of the moon.

It displays high-resolution computer graphics a few millimeters from the user’s eyes, all while allowing the user to control a desktop-like interface using their eyes and subtle hand gestures. The Vision Pro provides a preview of what using a computer could be like in five years, early adopters say.

The Vision Pro starts at $3,499. After adding storage and accessories such as straps, the whole package can cost as much as $4,500.

That’s a lot more expensive than competing headsets, such as Meta’s Quest 3, which starts at $499. It’s pricier than Meta’s high-end headset, the Quest Pro, which starts at $999. It’s also more expensive, even after controlling for inflation, than the first iPad ($499) or the first iPhone ($499 with a two-year contract).

The Vision Pro includes lots of pricey state-of-the-art parts. One estimate from research firm Omdia puts the “bill of materials” for the headset at $1,542, and that doesn’t include the costs of research and development, packaging, marketing or Apple’s profit margin.

The most expensive part in the headset is the 1.25 inch Sony Semiconductor display that goes in front of the user’s eye.

It’s a key component that helps the virtual experience feel more realistic than previous consumer headsets. The displays have a lot of pixels and lifelike colors, and are built with state-of-the-art manufacturing techniques.

Apple pays about $228 for the “Micro OLED” displays it uses, according to the Omdia estimate. Each Vision Pro needs two of them, one for each eye. Sony Semiconductor declined CNBC’s request to comment for this story.

The Vision Pro displays are the latest example of Apple embracing a new kind of display technology at a larger scale and earlier than the rest of the electronics industry.

Apple’s usage of LCD touchscreens for the first iPhone in 2007, and its later transition to organic LEDs or OLED displays with the iPhone X in 2017, upended existing supply chains and, after Apple shipped millions of units, ultimately drove the cost of the parts for the entire industry down.

Apple has a massive effect on the display industry, said Jacky Qiu, co-founder of OTI Lumionics, which makes materials for manufacturing micro LED panels. He said display makers fight for Apple’s business, which can be make or break for these companies.

“Apple is now the biggest player in terms of OLEDs, in terms of displays. They are the ones that are basically taking all the high-margin displays, all the stuff that is the high-spec type of stuff that is allowing the panel makers today to become profitable,” Qiu said.

“You look at the display business, you either work for Apple and make the iPhone screens and you’re profitable, or you don’t, and you lose money. It’s as brutal as that,” Qiu said.

Micro OLED

The Vision Pro’s displays are a defining feature. They’re packed with pixels and are sharper than any competing headset.

It’s one of the main points that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg complimented when comparing the $499 Quest 3 headset to Apple’s headset.

“Apple’s screen does have a higher resolution and that’s really nice,” Zuckerberg said in a video posted on his Instagram page, while saying that Quest’s screens are brighter.

“What’s so revolutionary about the OLED displays that are in the Vision Pro, the difference between Micro OLED and the OLED that you find on a television in your living room is that the pixels are actually a lot denser, they’re smaller and they’re more compact,” said Wayne Rickard, CEO of Terecircuits, a company that makes materials and techniques for display manufacturing.

An Apple Vision Pro headset is displayed during the product release at an Apple Store in New York City on Feb. 2, 2024.

Angela Weiss | AFP | Getty Images

According to a teardown analysis from repair firm iFixit, each Vision Pro display has a resolution of 3660 by 3200 pixels. That’s more pixels per eye than the iPhone 15, which has a screen resolution of 2556 by 1179 pixels. Meta’s Quest 3 comes in at a resolution of 2,064 by 2,208 per eye.

The Vision Pro’s screens are much smaller than the iPhone’s screen, which makes the pixels closer together, and more difficult to manufacture. The Vision Pro displays have 3,386 pixels per inch versus the iPhone 15, which has about 460 pixels per inch on its display.

In total, Apple says the Vision Pro’s displays have more than 23 million total pixels.

They’re some of the densest displays ever built. According to iFixit, 54 Vision Pro pixels can fit in a single iPhone pixel, and each pixel is about 7.5 microns from the next pixel, a measurement called “pixel pitch,” according to Apple’s specifications.

The Apple Vision Pro home screen.

Todd Haselton | CNBC

“With Micro LEDs in particular, it can get down to about below 10 microns. For comparison, a red blood cell might be about 20 microns, so half the size of a red blood cell,” Rickard said.

Apple opted for high-resolution displays so they’d be closer to simulating reality when using the headset’s passthrough mode, which uses outward-facing cameras to show video of the real world inside the headset. It also helps users read text or numbers in virtual reality. It helps remove the “screen door” effect of other headsets where you can see the pixels.

VR headsets need pixel-dense displays because the user’s eyes are so close to the screen. TVs have significantly fewer pixels, but it doesn’t matter because viewers are feet away.

The production of this kind of display requires cutting-edge manufacturing. For example, most displays are built on a backplane made out of glass. The Vision Pro displays are so pixel-dense that they use a silicon backplane, much like a semiconductor.

‘An incredible amount of technology packed into the product’

The new Apple Vision Pro headset is displayed during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California, on June 5, 2023.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

The second most expensive part in the Vision Pro is the company’s main processor, which includes Apple’s M2 chip, the same chip it uses in the MacBook Air, and the R1 chip, which is a custom processor to handle video feeds and other sensors on the device.

Bill of materials estimates don’t take into account research and development costs, packaging or shipping. They also don’t take into account capital expenditures that can add up-front costs to big parts orders, but they’re useful for people in the manufacturing world to get an idea of how expensive the parts are in any given device.

Display technologies embraced by Apple typically come down in price after Apple makes them mainstream and as multiple suppliers compete for business.

“South Korean suppliers like Samsung Display and LG Display have shown their interest in this technology. Chinese suppliers like Seeya and BOE are also small-scale mass-produced [OLED on silicon] products,” said Jay Shao, Omdia analyst for displays, in an email. He expects the costs for Vision Pro spec screens to come down in the coming years.

Apple declined to comment, but Apple CEO Tim Cook is not a fan of cost estimates and teardowns. “I’ve never seen one that’s even close to accurate,” he said on an earnings call in 2015.

Apple doesn’t typically discuss its suppliers, but in February, Cook was asked about the device’s price tag on an earnings call.

“If you look at it from a price point of view, there’s an incredible amount of technology packed into the product,” Cook said.

He mentioned some of the most expensive parts in the device and emphasized the R&D costs that Apple spent developing it.

“There’s 5,000 patents in the product, and it’s built on many innovations that Apple has spent multiple years on from silicon to displays and significant AI and machine learning. All the hand tracking, the room mapping, all of this stuff is driven by AI, and so we’re incredibly excited about it,” Cook continued.

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Qualcomm says it expects $4 billion in PC chip sales by 2029, as company gets traction beyond smartphones

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Qualcomm says it expects  billion in PC chip sales by 2029, as company gets traction beyond smartphones

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon speaks at the Computex forum in Taipei, Taiwan, June 3, 2024.

Ann Wang | Reuters

Qualcomm said on Tuesday that it expects its push into new markets to generate an additional $22 billion per year by 2029.

Of that amount, roughly $4 billion will come from PC chips, Qualcomm said at its investor day on Tuesday. The chipmaker just introduced PC processors earlier this year, when it released Snapdragon X for Windows devices.

The latest forecast marks an important milestone for Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, who took over the company in 2021 with a promise to get past a reliance on smartphones. In fiscal 2024, Qualcomm’s handset business reported $24.86 billion in sales, about 75% of its entire chip business.

Qualcomm also said on Tuesday that automotive revenues would rise about 175% by 2029 to $8 billion, of which 80% is tied to contracts that have already been secured.

We have been on this trajectory realizing that the technologies we have developed over the many years can be very relevant to a number of different industries beyond mobile,” Amon said at the investor event.

Another $4 billion in revenue will come from industrial chips and $2 billion will come from chips for headsets, a category Qualcomm calls XR. About $4 billion of the forecast is a catch-all for other chip sales, like those for wireless headphones and tablets.

Qualcomm shares are up 16% this year, trailing the Nasdaq, which has gained 26%.

Qualcomm grew rapidly over the past decade as its modems and processors became essential parts for high-end smartphones, especially those running Google Android. Qualcomm also sells modems and related parts to Apple for its iPhones.

But the company has warned investors that Apple could choose to stop buying Qualcomm parts as soon as 2027. Qualcomm said on Tuesday that its growing businesses will more than offset any losses from Apple.

A Li Auto L9 electric vehicle (EV) is seen displayed at the Qualcomm booth during the first China International Supply Chain Expo (CISCE) in Beijing, China November 28, 2023. 

Florence Lo | Reuters

Qualcomm’s strategy under Amon has been to use the technology its developed for its handset chips, like modems, processors, and AI accelerators, in new markets, including cars, PCs, and virtual reality. The investor event was the first time in years that the company has given a forecast for those new markets. Qualcomm said its total addressable market is as large as $900 billion.

“We put a strategy in ’21, and we’re not changing our strategy,” Amon said.

Laptop and desktop chips are currently dominated by Intel, which has over 70% percent of the market, according to Mercury Research. Intel reported $29 billion in PC chip sales in its 2023.

“The competitive landscape changed between the Windows and Macs,” Amon said, referring to Apple’s move in 2020 to switch from Intel to its own processors. “We saw that as an opportunity, especially as the ecosystem did not have confidence in the existing players to actually deliver a solution.”

The forecast for XR headsets also hints at the growth potential of the VR market over the next five years. Qualcomm supplies chips to many of the top headset makers, including Meta for its Quest and Ray-Bans products.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, Qualcomm calls itself an “edge AI” company, in contrast to cloud-based AI that’s typically powered by Nvidia processors. Company officials didn’t rule out introducing data center products in an interview with CNBC.

Qualcomm suggested that its mobile chips will be able to run the kind of advanced AI that’s restricted to large server farms today, an indication that that company may benefit from the AI boom down the road as the technology becomes more efficient.

“What you can run on the cloud last year, you can run on the device this year,” Durga Malladi, Qualcomm’s senior vice president in charge of planning, said at the event.

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Bitcoin ETF options begin trading, ushering in a new way for investors to hedge their bitcoin exposure

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Bitcoin ETF options begin trading, ushering in a new way for investors to hedge their bitcoin exposure

Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Options on BlackRock’s popular iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) began trading on the Nasdaq Tuesday, ushering in a new way to trade and speculate on the price of bitcoin.

IBIT traded 73,000 options contracts in the first 60 mins of trading Tuesday, Nasdaq told CNBC, placing the fund in the top 20 of the most active nonindex options.

Options trading allows investors to play bitcoin’s notorious volatility by letting them buy or sell an asset at a predetermined price based on whether they anticipate the price will rise or fall in a given period.

“Bitcoin has a lively derivatives market, but in the U.S. it is still tiny compared to other asset classes, and is largely limited to institutional players,” said Noelle Acheson, economist and author of the “Crypto is Macro Now” newsletter. “A deeper onshore derivatives market will enhance the growing market sophistication. This will reinforce investor confidence in the asset, bringing in new cohorts while enabling a greater variety of investment and trading strategies … [That] should, all else being equal, dampen both volatility and downside.”

The market for options contracts on major ETFs can be extremely active, and are widely used by more sophisticated traders. For example, over the past five business days, Interactive Brokers clients have more options orders on the Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ) and the SDPR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) than for the funds themselves, according to data from the brokerage.

The launch of the bitcoin ETF options will likely also lead to new funds that incorporate those options, said Todd Sohn, ETF strategist at Strategas.

“Grayscale already did a filing for a covered call [fund], and I’m sure BlackRock will come out with it too. And then we’re going to get buffers, and then we’re going to get whatever other trend-following-type strategy that folks think of. I think the ecosystem’s really going to start to fly here,” Sohn said.

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Intuit, H&R Block shares fall after report that Trump government efficiency team is considering tax-filing app

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Intuit, H&R Block shares fall after report that Trump government efficiency team is considering tax-filing app

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The stock prices for H&R Block and Intuit fell after a report Tuesday said Trump’s government efficiency team is considering creating a free tax-filing app.

Intuit, which makes the TurboTax tax-filing software, was down 5%, putting it on pace for its worst day since Aug. 23, when the company’s stock price fell nearly 7%. H&R Block was down 8% and on pace for its worst day since 2020.

President-elect Donald Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency” has held “highly preliminary” discussions about creating the free tax-filing app, The Washington Post reported. The so-called DOGE will not be an official government department but an outside advisory commission. It will be led by billionaire Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and aims to slash government spending.

A DOGE tax-filing app would be a competitor of both H&R Block and TurboTax.

Intuit spokeswoman Tania Mercado didn’t directly address the prospect of a government tax-filing app, but told CNBC in a statement that, “For decades, Intuit has publicly called for simplifying the U.S. tax code so individuals, families, and small businesses can better understand their finances.”

George Agurkis, H&R Block’s director of government relations, said in an email that the company looks forward “to engaging with the new Administration and the Department of Government Efficiency on their ideas related to sound and efficient tax administration.”

It’s unclear where a new DOGE tax app would bridge with newer policies the Biden administration already implemented. Under the Biden administration, the IRS in March rolled out a pilot Direct File program in 12 states, allowing qualified taxpayers to file directly through a government portal. The IRS also offers free filing services through its Free File program for taxpayers who make an adjusted gross income of $79,000 or less. 

While both Intuit and H&R Block have free filing options, neither have had stellar records when it comes to transparently offering those services. 

The Federal Trade Commission in February filed an administrative complaint against H&R Block for deceptively marketing free filing products and wrongfully deleting users’ in-progress tax data. Intuit, meanwhile, agreed to pay $141 million in restitution “for deceiving millions of low-income Americans into paying for tax services that should have been free,” according to the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James.

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