Apple reiterated a key fact about the Vision Pro: it will be released "early" in 2024. With no clear date, it has been left to a relentless stream of rumors to fill in the blanks, with everyone pointing to a March release.

But as the inevitable change from day to night (mostly night here in the UK), Bloomberg's Mark Gurman is here to deny his own past leaks. According to inside sources, the Apple Vision Pro could be "launched" by January.

If you don't splurge on Christmas (my nephew could probably recreate a life-size Adventure Bay with the Paw Patrol toy he got), you should be able to get an Apple Vision Pro for as little as $3,500.

Why is Garman so confident? It's because of the "carefully planned" walk-through of the setup process and the professional sales experience Apple plans to offer its customers, including customizing the headset for each customer and boxing it up on the spot.

This requires staff training, and Gurman revealed a two-day initiative in which selected store employees will be trained on the experience. This training is scheduled to begin in mid-January, coinciding with the likelihood that Apple Stores will soon have Vision Pro in stock.

The ultimate question now is what the appetite will be for an ultra-expensive, ultra-premium VR headset: regardless of the premium construction and technology behind the Vision Pro (which Hands-On called a breakthrough in mixed reality), the $3,499 price tag will be hard to swallow.

Apple has big ambitions for the headset and hopes it will be on 10 million faces within three years.

The $499 Meta Quest 3 offers a decent mixed reality suite, and the Xreal Air 2 AR glasses are given great software support to provide spatial computing on the cheap. Time will tell if this is the right strategy.