Many key people have left Apple in the past 12 months. Now Frank Casanova has also quit after 36 years in various positions in the company
What is Apple’s strategy with Vision Pro 1?
Casanova’s last job before quitting was managing the marketing of Vision Pro. In 2019, he got the job of leading the marketing of AR technology (as the first person in the position) for the company. He was even present with senior executives Eddy Cue (“Senior Vice President of Services”) and Dan Riccio (“Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering”) during the Vision Pro launch day in Los Angeles in February. Furthermore, Bloomberg reports that Riccio (61) is also approaching retirement age. It will be a tough role to replace.
There’s no doubt that AR products will be important, but the Vision Pro 1 is expensive and heavy and won’t find mainstream success at its current price tag. As we have previously reported, the company has internally stated that it will take many iterations before reaching a critical mass of users, but what happens if sales are significantly worse than even the most pessimistic inside Apple predicted?
Claims sales are even worse than expected
We don’t know what Apple can come up with to improve sales (permanent price cuts are not something Apple does for expensive and new products,) but the fact that they still haven’t launched the product in other countries is not a positive signal. In addition, long-time Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo now reports that Apple has lowered its sales forecasts for the headset from 700,000/800,000 to 400,000/450,000 in 2024. Kuo points to weak sales in the US as the reason why the expensive and heavy headset with impressive technology, not launched in other countries.
In recent months, we have written a number of cases about people who have left the Cupertino company. It is not unusual for colleagues to disappear, but many important ones start to appear in a short time in addition to Evans Hankey and Casanova:
