In case you were not allowed to stop working long enough to tune into Apple’s series of product announcements Monday, let me catch you up: The Cupertino-based technology company has a new device coming out called the Vision Pro. It’s an augmented reality headset that, while it looks pretty spiffy and is packed with neat tech, is both expensive and not coming to its first market until early next year.
Given the sheer amount of anticipation that the Apple headset brought along with it, you might be slightly underwhelmed to learn that the Vision Pro will cost $3,499, and if you are not in the United States, it will take a rather long time to make it to your door.
Investors in Apple shares bid the company’s stock to all-time highs ahead of the event. During the product informercial, shares of the company held up for a period, before losing steam along with the rest of the Nasdaq composite index.
Observe the following chart, set to track percentage changes during the day:
By my notes, the Apple headset bit kicked off around 2:20 p.m. to 2:25 p.m. ET, which you can spy as a nice little wiggle in the chart. However, if Apple shareholders had hoped that the actual announcement of the Vision Pro device would bolster the value of their holdings, they were disappointed. Some headlines are already linking the headset’s launch to Apple’s falling share price. Alas.
But not everyone was so bummed. After Unity got a shoutout for integrating its software with the new Apple device, its shares went straight up. Here’s the same chart as above but tweaked to also include Unity’s stock:
That is what it looks like when a piece of product news gets investors excited.
So what?
Normally when TechCrunch+ tracks the movement of Apple’s stock price during one of its events, nothing much happens and we report that and move on. Indeed, I’ve so often written up Apple stock price reports after its announcements that they have become a way for me to expound on the futility of divining stock market signals and to explore the tenuous connection between the movements in the value of the largest companies and the pedestrian things that they announce. Some tech companies are so big now that it’s hard to imagine any single thing really affecting their directional inertia.
Unity is not that big, and thus a change in its trading patterns is at once easier to effect and view.
That said if there were any Apple event in recent years that could have moved its share price, wasn’t this going to be it? A new hardware line, a new revenue source and potentially Apple’s footprint on the future of computing akin to the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone? Investors did not seem to think so.
I decline to paint a direct line between any facet of the Vision Pro launch and the value of Apple’s stock, but if the market was truly inspired by what Cupertino announced, surely we would have seen something, right?
The best we can do is note that Unity investors are currently popping a bottle of bubbly and toasting their good fortune. For Apple shareholders, hang tight, and save up your dividends for early next year when you might be able to buy the new Apple headset. Perhaps it will fare better than Microsoft’s HoloLens.
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