SUMMARY OF MONDAY'S APPLE CONFERENCE

As expected, Apple on Monday unveiled its first entry into the augmented reality market, Apple Vision Pro. However, the specific information given in the keynote at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference seems to have left investors somewhat cold.

While Apple's $AAPL+0.2% APL stock hit a record high at the start of Monday's session, the stock plunged during the more than two-hour presentation as some of the specifics of the launch didn't quite match the rumors and expectations.

Apple

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Here are six key takeaways from Monday's event, which was watched by more than a million people via the Internet.

The leaks were wrong in many details, and not in a good way: Perhaps the biggest problem analysts will have with the Vision Pro's launch is the price - $3,499, about $500 more than the $3,000 it was expected to cost. The device also won't go on sale until early 2024, which means it will miss the holiday season and sell later than most analysts on the Street anticipated. That's a double whammy that could force some analysts to lower expectations for the Vision Pro's impact on the company's fiscal year ending in September 2024. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, who remains bullish on Apple, expects the company to sell only 150,000 units in the first year and a million units in the second year, but at a lower price.

There were no killer apps: As my colleague Tae Kim noted, the Vision Pro glasses, which look similar to the fake glasses used in the movie Ready Player One, have a variety of uses. While Apple did showcase both corporate and consumer uses for the glasses, there simply weren't any killer gaming apps - or any other killer apps - that users are likely to spend that much money on, priced at seven times the price of Meta Platforms' (META) Quest 3 VR headset. Over time, however, sales of Apple products have been driven more by what other developers dream up than by their specifications. Not for nothing does Apple launch at WWDC, leaving time for its many partners to dream up new software and experiences.

Cheap MacBooks: As Tae notes, the price of the new 15-inch MacBook is very aggressive: $1,299. That should be good news for customers, and it should mean an increase in market share for Apple. On the other hand, Apple announced a new Mac Pro powered by the company's M2 Ultra chips - it's priced at a breathtaking $6,999. (You could buy five 15-inch MacBooks for the same price.)

Some exciting new features: The noise level around what's now called Apple Vision Pro has almost drowned out the flood of operating system updates for the Mac, iPhone, Watch, and Apple TV (the device, not the streaming channel). My colleague Alex Eule was intrigued by the new FaceTime feature for Apple TV, which makes it a video conferencing system. And we were both intrigued by the StandBy feature, which turns the phone into a desktop clock that can display data from a range of apps, and the new Watch software for cyclists and hikers. And here's the big news: you can now just say "Siri" rather than "Hey Siri" when connecting to Siri.

And what about artificial intelligence: Apple has made several nods to artificial intelligence, including improved auto-correction software. However, Apple is still not considered a big player in generative AI - while other key tech players such as Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOGL) and Adobe (ADBE) are aggressively rolling out new generative AI software. At some point, this will start to worry investors, who have dramatically increased the stock prices of key AI players.

What was missing: Last year, the company spent a considerable amount of time talking about the future of CarPlay - but this time around, there was barely any mention of the phone-to-car software. As mentioned, the company did announce an Apple TV update, but there was almost nothing about the status of Apple TV+ streaming services. And the company talked almost nothing about the services, which accounted for 22% of revenue last quarter.