The iPhone Ultra doesn’t need to be successful to be a success

Source Domain: www.macworld.com

Was Vision Pro a success? That depends on your definition. It hasn’t sold many units–perhaps a few hundred thousand, compared to 50 million or so iPhones in the last three months alone–but it has raised public awareness of a new product category and established Apple as one of that category’s major players. In other words, the product laid the groundwork for a cheaper and more widely accessible follow-up… the only problem being that Apple appears to have cancelled it.

Vision Pro, then, will probably go down in history as one of the least successful projects of the Tim Cook era. However, it shows that sales alone are not the be-all and end-all, particularly for first-generation products. And it offers a glimpse of a possible and perhaps even likely future for the iPhone Ultra: one in which it sells badly, and Apple doesn’t mind. Or doesn’t mind too much, anyway.

The sales part of the equation certainly looks ominous. If early leaks are accurate, the iPhone Ultra is going to face many of the same hurdles as last year’s iPhone Air: namely hardware compromises (two rather than three rear camera lenses, no MagSafe), and perceived question marks over durability (the hinge, the crease), with the added complication of a massive price tag and a form factor that will be completely alien to Apple fans. It’s like the Air, only more so. And while the Air may not have been the total flop we feared at first, it still didn’t set the house on fire, sales-wise.

There are some positives to the Ultra, of course. For one thing, the spec list should be a little better than that of the Air; two lenses is a major upgrade on the Air’s one, and there’s likely to be more battery capacity. MagSafe would be a painful omission for me, but I get the impression that other iPhone users don’t care quite as much.

More importantly, the Fold’s unorthodox and compromise-necessitating design is in service of actual functionality rather than just…

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