Sales of Apple’s pricey Vision Pro won’t reach 500,000 in its first year and will likely finish the ongoing third quarter with a 75% sequential drop, according to market intelligence firm IDC. 

Also read: While More Than Half of Americans Are Interested in Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro, 76% Say They Have No Intention of Buying One

IDC also said that the mixed reality rig has yet to reach 100,000 unit sales in a quarter. 

The Apple Vision Pro debuted in the U.S. back on February 2 with a $3,500 price tag and an aggressive TV marketing campaign that ran in heavy rotation during the NFL postseason. 

The Apple Vision Pro is set to debut Friday (July 12) in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France and Germany. But domestically, it has struggled to seed demand, even with Apple structuring a zero-interest payment plan for consumers. 

IDC believes a more affordable version of the Apple Vision Pro — due out next year, reportedly with a price tag that’s half that of the current version — could spark sales. 

But a lack of available content might be limiting demand as much as the price point. 

“The Vision Pro’s success, regardless of its price, will ultimately depend on the available content,” said Francisco Jeronimo, VP at IDC, in a statement. “As Apple expands the product to international markets, it’s crucial that local content is also made available.”

The constantly percolating promises for the Internet of Things heated up this month as several forecasts envisioned accelerating IoT momentum. 

The new spate of predictions leapfrogged the promises described here. Now numbers such as $1.7 trillion or $3 trillion are the revenue targets (depending on who you believe), and 27 billion or 50 billion devices will be in use (again chose your preferred prognosticator).

Related:The IoT Customers Are Coming. Are You Ready?

Beyond the predictable inconsistent hype, though, is a fundamental recognition that processes are moving quickly now to develop applications and distribution systems for IoT ecosystems. There's plenty of talk about wireless facilities, including broadband in the IoT outlooks, but "cable" is missing from the prognosticators' papers.

Not that existing telecom carriers are absent from the IoT predictions. Indeed, this month's spate of forecasts -- from groups including Gartner, International Data Corp. (IDC),  Machina Research, ABI Research, Cisco and others -- repeatedly emphasized the importance of very short-range IoT connections, similar to the ones that cable companies' "smart home" services are beginning to offer.

Many of the IoT forecasts also concentrate on the role of "smart cities," an opportunity in which cable's core infrastructure becomes a factor.

A McKinsey research report expects that hundreds of "smart cities" worldwide by 2025 will generate 60% of global GDP. Building systems for that capacity is clearly part of the IoT equation -- especially with corporate users expected to be the primary engine for IoT initially.  

That's another opportunity for integrated cable infrastructure. (Separately, several policy development - such as the FCC's ongoing Business Data Servicesrulemaking also raise smart cities issues. In addition, groups such as the Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group (BITAG) are examining the technical aspects of IoT security and privacy.

With the onslaught of new IoT forecasts, it's easy to get lost in the deluge of data.  A sage analysis in the IEEE Spectrumrecently pointed out that many of the IoT forecasts are based "on the demand for devices that have largely not yet been invented or commercialized."

Therein lies the challenge for cable and other infrastructure providers who are trying to foresee the facilities need to reach those unknown (unknowable) devices.

Nonetheless, the enthusiasm of this month's forecasts recognizes the quickening pace of IoT creativity. For example, IDC issued several reports in the past fortnight, including its "2016 Mid-Year Review of IoT"and its globalsurvey "International Initiatives in IoT."IDC characterized IoT as "one of the hottest technology trends across a multitude of industries."

IDC's forecasts envision a nearly 10-fold growth in IoT "actionable data" delivery between 2020 and 2025, resulting in a global annual 180 Zettabytes (that is 180 trillion gigabytes) of data created nine years from now (up from 10 Zettabytes last year).

Machina Research brings a much more conservative perspective, but still foresees a  $3 trillion  revenue opportunity from IoT by 2025. It expects that IoT will generate only 2 Zettabytes of data, mostly from consumer electronics devices. It envisions that many of the connections will be handled by Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) connections, such as LoRa (a low-power, long-range wireless protocol), Sigfox (a proprietary IoT format developed by a French firm), and LTE-NB1 (a Narrow Band wireless technology optimized for IoT).

The ABI Research study looked at the role of IoT in the emerging market for machine learning technologies for data analytics. It forecasts nearly $20 billion in revenue in 2021 "as Machine-Learning-as-a-Service (MLaaS) models take off."

To put the recent IoT hype into further perspective: They emerged just as Cisco and Intel announced massive layoffs in their traditional businesses to focus on IoT. Cisco said early this month that it would shed 5,500 staff as it "refocuses" on IoT, security, next-generation data centers and cloud" services. Intel's announcement at last week's Intel Developers Forum that it would concentrate on IoT and virtual reality followed its decision in April to lay off 12,000 employees, most of them involved with Intel's historic (but slowing) personal computer activities.

Collectively, this month's reports about IoT opportunities should fuel attention to the role that broadband operators -- with their forays into wireless micro-local delivery -- will play in the new IoT category that is both over-hyped and under-hyped simultaneously.

Another forecast believes that there will be some significant financial substance to go along with all the hype around virtual reality and augmented reality.

Worldwide revenues for the AR and VR market will surge from $5.2 billion in 2016 to north of $162 billion in 2020, predicted International Data Corp. (IDC) a new report/forecast.

In that report – the Worldwide Semiannual Augmented and Virtual Reality Spending Guide – IDC sees AR/VR generating a compound annual growth rate 181.3% over the 2015-2020 forecast period.

IDC expects sales of AR/VR hardware to generate more than 50% of worldwide revenues during that span, and sees the Asia Pacific (excluding Japan), the U.S. and Western Europe accounting for 75% of worldwide the sector’s revenues.

IDC’s forecast arrives seven months after Goldman Sachs analyst Heather Bellini issued a report predicting that VR and AR could generate up to $182 billion in revenue, including hardware and software/content, by 2025, and eclipse television revenue.

IDC noted that the pairing of high-powered smartphones with headsets (something that Google is pursuing hard with its new Android-based Daydream project) are poised to drive the market forward to the masses.

"For many years augmented and virtual reality were the stuff of science fiction. Now with powerful smartphones powering inexpensive VR headsets, the consumer market is primed for new paid and user generated content-driven experiences,” Chris Chute, VP, customer insights and analysis at IDC, said in a statement.

"The rise of new, less expensive hardware will put virtual and augmented reality technology within the grasp of a growing numbers of companies and individuals," added Tom Mainelli, VP, devices & AR/VR at IDC. "But, as always, what people can do with that hardware will depend upon the applications and services that power it. In the coming years, we expect developers to create a wide range of new experiences for these devices that will fundamentally change the way many of us do work."

For operators eyeing Internet of Things projects, their best allies may be in the retail sector, while the traditionally laggard healthcare and government categories are likely to be late adopters of IoT technology.

In its "2015 Global IoT Decision Maker Survey," International Data Corp. (IDC) found that more than 90% of executives who know about IoT expect that it will be important in some way, although they don't necessarily know how or why it will be so.

The IDC study also found vast pockets of unawareness of IoT, with fewer than half of decision-makers in categories such as finance, healthcare and government familiar with IoT and its capabilities (see table, pictured).

IDC's research (which focused on enterprise, not residential IoT plans) suggests potential collaborative allies for operators that are developing IoT agendas. Opportunities range from integrated home services development to key advertising/marketing alliances between operators and application providers.

The just-released global study also found that "security remains a leading challenge," but IDC said "upfront and ongoing costs have become the top challenges" for potential IoT implementation. IDC also found that software vendors are overtaking hardware suppliers as the leading force in IoT expansion.

In addition, IDC said development trends point toward IoT processing at the edge of the network (that is, near the user site). It concluded that such a structure will pose a major challenge to "many IoT architecture designs."

"IoT momentum continues to grow, and our survey shows that it is seen as strategic to the enterprise," said Vernon Turner, IDC senior vice president and research fellow, Internet of Things. But although the decisionmakers thought IoT would be of strategic importance to their businesses, only 24% of respondents considered it to be "transformational."

Strangely, 73% of respondents told IDC that IoT is part of their current 12-month deployment plan agenda -- despite the seeming unawareness of IoT details by so many decisionmakers. The seemingly incongruous finding suggests that many executives have their own definition of what exactly constitutes an IoT plan.

Similarly, in a somewhat contradictory finding, IDC found that the healthcare industry leads the field with 72% of respondents identifying IoT as a strategic tool. Again, that suggests that healthcare -- often cited as a poster child for IoT deployment, especially for monitors, sensors and wireless capabilities -- may pose a disconnect. For example, IoT connections may be established within medical facilities but not extend as quickly as expected into residential environments. That could affect operators' enthusiasm for IoT infrastructure.

The main three reasons for IoT activity among the IDC respondents were increased productivity (cited by 14.2%), shortened time to market (11.8%) and new opportunities for business process automation (10.1%).