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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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Tech founders call on Sequoia Capital to denounce VC Shaun Maguire’s Mamdani comments

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Tech founders call on Sequoia Capital to denounce VC Shaun Maguire's Mamdani comments

Almost 600 people have signed an open letter to leaders at venture firm Sequoia Capital after one of its partners, Shaun Maguire, posted what the group described as a “deliberate, inflammatory attack” against the Muslim Democratic mayoral candidate in New York City.

Maguire, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, posted on X over the weekend that Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic primary last month, “comes from a culture that lies about everything” and is out to advance “his Islamist agenda.”

The post had 5.3 million views as of Monday afternoon. Maguire, whose investments include Elon Musk’s SpaceX and X as well as artificial intelligence startup Safe Superintelligence, also published a video on X explaining the remark.

Those signing the letter are asking Sequoia to condemn Maguire’s comments and apologize to Mamdani and Muslim founders. They also want the firm to authorize an independent investigation of Maguire’s behavior in the past two years and post “a zero-tolerance policy on hate speech and religious bigotry.”

They are asking the firm for a public response by July 14, or “we will proceed with broader public disclosure, media outreach and mobilizing our networks to ensure accountability,” the letter says.

Sequoia declined to comment. Maguire didn’t respond to a request for comment, but wrote in a post about the letter on Wednesday that, “You can try everything you want to silence me, but it will just embolden me.”

Among the signees are Mudassir Sheikha, CEO of ride-hailing service Careem, and Amr Awadallah, CEO of AI startup Vectara. Also on the list is Abubakar Abid, who works in machine learning Hugging Face, which is backed by Sequoia, and Ahmed Sabbah, CEO of Telda, a financial technology startup that Sequoia first invested in four years ago.

At least three founders of startups that have gone through startup accelerator program Y Combinator added their names to the letter.

Sequoia as a firm is no stranger to politics. Doug Leone, who led the firm until 2022 and remains a partner, is a longtime Republican donor, who supported Trump in the 2024 election. Following Trump’s victory in November, Leone posted on X, “To all Trump voters:  you no longer have to hide in the shadows…..you’re the majority!!”

By contrast, Leone’s predecessor, Mike Moritz, is a Democratic megadonor, who criticized Trump and, in August, slammed his colleagues in the tech industry for lining up behind the Republican nominee. In a Financial Times opinion piece, Moritz wrote Trump’s tech supporters were “making a big mistake.”

“I doubt whether any of them would want him as part of an investment syndicate that they organised,” wrote Moritz, who stepped down from Sequoia in 2023, over a decade after giving up a management role at the firm. “Why then do they dismiss his recent criminal conviction as nothing more than a politically inspired witch-hunt over a simple book-keeping error?”

Neither Leone nor Moritz returned messages seeking comment.

Roelof Botha, Sequoia’s current lead partner, has taken a more neutral stance. Botha said at an event last July that Sequoia as a partnership doesn’t “take a political point of view,” adding that he’s “not a registered member of either party.” Boelof said he’s “proud of the fact that we’ve enabled many of our partners to express their respected individual views along the way, and given them that freedom.”

Maguire has long been open with his political views. He said on X last year that he had “just donated $300k to President Trump.”

Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, has gained the ire of many people in tech and in the business community more broadly since defeating former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the June primary.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

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Samsung expects second-quarter profits to more than halve as it struggles to capture AI demand

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Samsung expects second-quarter profits to more than halve as it struggles to capture AI demand

Samsung signage during the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California, US, on Thursday, March 20, 2025.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

South Korea’s Samsung Electronics on Tuesday forecast a 56% fall in profits for the second as the company struggles to capture demand from artificial intelligence chip leader Nvidia. 

The memory chip and smartphone maker said in its guidance that operating profit for the quarter ending June was projected to be around 4.6 trillion won, down from 10.44 trillion Korean won year over year.

The figure is a deeper plunge compared to smart estimates from LSEG, which are weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate.

According to the smart estimates, Samsung was expected to post an operating profit of 6.26 trillion won ($4.57 billion) for the quarter. Meanwhile, Samsung projected its revenue to hit 74 trillion won, falling short of LSEG smart estimates of 75.55 trillion won.

Samsung is a leading player in the global smartphone market and is also one of the world’s largest makers of memory chips, which are utilized in devices such as laptops and servers.

However, the company has been falling behind competitors like SK Hynix and Micron in high-bandwidth memory chips — an advanced type of memory that is being deployed in AI chips.

“The disappointing earnings are due to ongoing operating losses in the foundry business, while the upside in high-margin HBM business remains muted this quarter,” MS Hwang, Research Director at Counterpoint Research, said about the earnings guidance.

SK Hynix, the leader in HBM, has secured a position as Nvidia’s key supplier. While Samsung has reportedly been working to get the latest version of its HBM chips certified by Nvidia, a report from a local outlet suggests these plans have been pushed back to at least September.

The company did not respond to a request for comment on the status of its deals with Nvidia.

Ray Wang, Research Director of Semiconductors, Supply Chain and Emerging Technology at Futurum Group told CNBC that it is clear that Samsung has yet to pass Nvidia’s qualification for its most advanced HBM.

“Given that Nvidia accounts for roughly 70% of global HBM demand, the delay meaningfully caps near-term upside,” Wang said. He noted that while Samsung has secured some HBM supply for AI processors from AMD, this win is unlikely to contribute to second-quarter results due to the timing of production ramps.

Meanwhile, Samsung’s chip foundry business continues to face weak orders and serious competition from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Wang added.

Reuters reported in September that Samsung had instructed its subsidiaries worldwide to cut 30% of staff in some divisions, citing sources familiar with the matter.

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Waymo to begin testing in Philadelphia with safety drivers behind the wheel

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Waymo to begin testing in Philadelphia with safety drivers behind the wheel

A Waymo autonomous self-driving Jaguar electric vehicle sits parked at an EVgo charging station in Los Angeles, California, on May 15, 2024.

Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images

Waymo said it will begin testing in Philadelphia, with a limited fleet of vehicles and human safety drivers behind the wheel.

“This city is a National Treasure,” Waymo wrote in a post on X on Monday. “It’s a city of love, where eagles fly with a gritty spirit and cheese that spreads and cheese that steaks. Our road trip continues to Philly next.”

The Alphabet-owned company confirmed to CNBC that it will be testing in Pennsylvania’s largest city through the fall, adding that the initial fleet of cars will be manually driven through the more complex parts of Philadelphia, including downtown and on freeways.

“Folks will see our vehicles driving at all hours throughout various neighborhoods, from North Central to Eastwick, and from University City to as far east as the Delaware River,” a Waymo spokesperson said.

With its so-called road trips, Waymo seeks to collect mapping data and evaluate how its autonomous technology, Waymo Driver, performs in new environments, handling traffic patterns and local infrastructure. Road trips are often used a way for the company to gauge whether it can potentially offer a paid ride share service in a particular location.

The expanded testing, which will go through the fall, comes as Waymo aims for a broader rollout. Last month, the company announced plans to drive vehicles manually in New York for testing, marking the first step toward potentially cracking the largest U.S. city. Waymo applied for a permit with the New York City Department of Transportation to operate autonomously with a trained specialist behind the wheel in Manhattan. State law currently doesn’t allow for such driverless operations.

Waymo One provides more than 250,000 paid trips each week across Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, Texas, and is preparing to bring fully autonomous rides to Atlanta, Miami, and Washington, D.C., in 2026.

Alphabet has been under pressure to monetize artificial intelligence products as it bolsters spending on infrastructure. Alphabet’s “Other Bets” segment, which includes Waymo, brought in revenue of $1.65 billion in 2024, up from $1.53 billion in 2023. However, the segment lost $4.44 billion last year, compared to a loss of $4.09 billion the previous year.

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