A chip-and-ship refresh to Vision Pro might arrive this year

A chip-and-ship refresh to Vision Pro might arrive this year

Christian Zibreg ∙ July 10, 2025

Apple could refresh its Vision Pro headset this year, but the device will reportedly be a “chip-and-ship” update instead of a major redesign.

Mark Gurman reported on Bloomberg today that the first official refresh to the Vision Pro headset will swap the Apple M2 chip for the current M4 processor, which debuted in 2024. It will be a “chip-and-ship” update, an industry term denoting a hardware refresh that mostly just updates the main processor.

Aside from an upgraded chip, the refreshed should bring a redesigned strap to improve the comfort of the device by addressing neck pain and head fatigue.

An upgraded Vision Pro with an M4 chip and a comfier head strap might arrive this year

The first Vision Pro arrived in February 2024, featuring Apple’s M2 chip, which launched in June 2022 and was already two and a half years old. When the next Vision Pro launches, which Gurman says should be “as early as this year,” its M4 chip (launched in May 2024) will be about a year and a half old. The M4 will enable the headset to run the whole suite of Apple Intelligence features, smoother and faster.

That’s because Apple could outfit the Neural Engine in the M4-equipped headset with more than sixteen cores. That would make the M4 in the second-generation Vision Pro Apple’s first chip with more than sixteen Neural Engine cores.

Apple is also testing versions of the new device that increase the number of cores inside of the neural engine — a component for processing artificial intelligence tasks. The neural engine in the current Vision Pro includes 16 cores, a measure of processing power. These capabilities are critical for a device that relies on AI for the live processing of imagery and applications in complex virtual environments.

Neural Engine is Apple’s marketing name for dedicated hardware in Apple silicon chips designed to accelerate AI and machine learning tasks without taxing the CPU, GPU and the battery. The Neural Engine in the current M4 chip has sixteen cores and is capable of performing 38 trillion operations per second (TOPS), which is roughly two times faster than the Neural Engine in the M2 chip powering the first Vision Pro.

This on new straps:

The company is also prototyping new straps that are designed to reduce neck strain and head pain. Discomfort from the roughly 1.4-pound device has been one of the biggest complaints about the first Vision Pro. The hope is to address that problem without meaningfully reducing the weight of the hardware — at least with the first update.

Gurman didn’t mention pricing. Considering Apple is only refreshing the main chip and the head strap, Vision Pro 2 should be priced at $3500, the same as the starting price of the first model.

What about an M5 Vision Pro?

Industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggested Apple might release a new Vision Pro powered by an upcoming M5 chip by the end of 2025. But Gurman says we’ll instead get a “chip-and-ship” M4 Vision Pro this year, followed by a lighter, more affordable version “that significantly reduces the weight of the headset” in 2027.

Tags Apple Apple M4 Bloomberg Mark Gurman Rumor Rumors Vision Pro
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