Samsung is working on an Apple Vision Pro-like high-end VR and mixed reality headset, and it’s going to be a niche concern.
According to South Korean publication Business Post, Samsung’s production estimates for the device are 100,000 units a year.
This is a fairly low rate of production even by the standards of the Apple Vision Pro, which has widely been viewed as a flop. Apple’s Vision Pro reportedly sold an estimated 420,000 units in 2024.
Veteran Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed in 2024 Apple originally planned for shipments of between 700,000 and 800,000 units.
One obvious question is why Samsung would invest so much into the development of this headset when it can’t hope to make a major impact of profit with such limited penetration.
There are a couple of important factors here that will spur Samsung on regardless.
First, this headset is positioned to introduce the world to Android XR, the mixed reality fork of Android that will presumably be used across all sorts of grades of VR headset in the future. This is a Samsung-Google partnership project, just as the (somewhat) recent relaunches of Wear OS have been.
There’s also much to gain from Samsung’s XR headset for the company’s display panel arm, Samsung Display.
Apple’s Vision Pro uses a micro OLED panel made by Sony, not Samsung. And in order for Samsung to meaningfully develop its production processes with micro OLED, and increase yield, it needs to actually be making the things at scale.
Samsung’s OLED History
Samsung has history regarding abandoning OLED, and may not want to let others get ahead in this tech space again. Samsung made just one OLED TV back in 2013, and then abandoned the technology altogether for TVs, instead leaning heavily on its LCD-based sets, eventually enhanced with Quantum Dot panel architecture.
The issue in Samsung’s RGB-based OLED TV, which did look excellent, was its red, green and blue sub pixels did not age at the same rate. LG Display stuck it out, using an RGBW sub pixel array — one with an additional white sub-pixel to dramatically increase light output and take the pressure off the color sub-pixels.
Micro OLED brings with it a whole new world of production hurt and headache. And this will ensure the Samsung XR will be a high-price headset just like the Apple Vision Pro, a characteristic already strongly suggested by the relatively low-scale production plans.
According to The Elec, the Samsung XR is expected to have an even higher pixel density display than that of the Apple Vision Pro, with 3800 pixels per inch to the 3400 of the Vision Pro. Remember when Apple set the Retina standard for phone screens in 2010 with the iPhone 4? That was a 326 pixels per inch screen, offering some idea as to how fiddly to make these current and upcoming micro OLED displays must be.
The Samsung XR headset was announced at the end of 2024 and is due for release later in 2025.
