A number of scalped Apple Vision Pro pre-orders have sold on eBay for upwards of $6,000.

When you just gotta have it, I guess money is no object for some.

When Vision Pro pre-orders opened up on January 19th, the delivery dates for online orders quickly pushed back all the way into March. However, in-store pre-orders are still expected within the first few days of release at many stores.

Some of that demand appears to have been from scalpers who pre-ordered the headset with the goal of reselling their pre-ordered unit for even more money on Ebay.

There are presently more than 1,200 listings on Ebay for pre-ordered Vision Pro headsets, most promising to be shipped from the scalper to the second-hand buyer on the same day that the headset is delivered.

Looking at sold items only, we can see that someone paid $6,140 for a 1TB variant of the headset (which is normally priced at $3,900). Don’t worry though—shipping is free.

Who Will Have the Last Laugh?

Although some scalpers appear to be making a huge profit on their early pre-orders, it looks like many others may end up being the greater fool—among more than 1,200 Vision Pro listings on Ebay, only 44 have been successfully sold thus far.

In theory that means the vast majority of scalpers who thought they could make a quick buck by jumping in the pre-order line and then reselling their spot will be stuck footing the bill for a headset they themselves may not even want. However, with Vision Pro launch day right around the corner, it’s possible that another wave of hype will cause more to go looking for

Who is Buying These Anyway?

As for who is buying these pre-ordered headsets for a huge markup? It’s tough to say exactly but there are several possibilities.

On one hand, it’s possible that some scalpers are buying the headsets from themselves at high prices to inflate the apparent value of an early pre-order. On the other hand, there may be folks with excess cash who just had to have one on the first day and didn’t mind paying for it.

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And then there’s people who are outside of the US but want the headset immediately, even before Apple formally launches Vision Pro in their country. At the time of writing, the headset is only officially for sale in the US, and Apple hasn’t announced when it will expand into other countries. For some, buying a pre-ordered from Ebay may be an effort to have the headset shipped to another country.

And last but not least, there may be large companies out there who want to get their hands on Vision Pro as soon as possible, either for competitive analysis or to try to get an early head start on integrating their software and services with the headset. A company like Meta, for instance, may want to get a handful of headsets as quickly as possible and isn’t going to blink at a $6,000 price tag.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • TheAK

    >In theory that means the vast majority of scalpers who thought they
    could make a quick buck by jumping in the pre-order line and then
    reselling their spot will be stuck footing the bill for a headset they
    themselves may not even want.
    Just temporarily, returns are a thing, especially of a brand new unopened product.

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    While the batch for 2024-02-02 was gone quickly for online orders, it took ~10h for all participating Apple stores to report the initial contingent as sold out. I don’t know the delivery estimate for someone ordering now, but it seemed rather stable at mid March for some time, hinting that a) Apple will get more AVP soon and b) most that wanted one ASAP managed to order quickly after pre-orders opened.

    Unless new orders will now ship much later, those paying USD 6000/50% extra on ebay would do that for getting the device about 30-40 days earlier, while risking to get a box filled with bricks, and missing the custom fit pads matching their head shape.

    With 1200 ebay listings out of estimated 60K-80K launch day sales, >98% sold to actual customers (or scalpers selling somewhere else). I’d expect companies like Meta to be aware of the launch and having a couple of people order them online, or within the first 10h reserve enough to be picked up at an Apple Store. The only group that might be interested are those outside the US, which would not only face the danger of getting expensive bricks, but also no support by Apple. And a number of people in Europe managed to preorder themselves by different means, to not have to wait for an expected AVP launch in Europe by mid 2024.

    My guess is that almost all of the AVP sold on ebay were bought by the scalpers themselves to feign demand, and that high price and continued AVP production will pretty much kill their get-rich-quick scheme.

  • MackRogers

    Classic honeypot scam on ebay. Nobody is buying those they are just trying to set a market to see if they can catch a few guppies. Tale as old as time.

    • ViRGiN

      Man, you’re sooo fuming ever since Apple denied your credit card.

    • kool

      This has nothing to do with a honey pot how is it a classic one?

      • MackRogers

        shhh the adults are talking

        • kool

          Yeah the guy who doesn’t know what a honey pot is and is triggered by down votes is an adult? Good luck with that bubble…

  • xyzs

    There is a special place in hell for these nefarious toxic pieces of ship.

    How can someone be less useful for the world than a scalper except a trader ?

    • ViRGiN

      Tale as old as the world – buy something cheap, sell it for more.
      AVP isn’t sold out either.

      I don’t understand what are you so butthurt about.

    • Naruto Uzumaki

      But but what about Putin he reminds us almost every month that he’s going to nuk everybody

    • xyzs

      We know who are the toxic and offended scalpers by checking the down votes lool

      Nobody except a toxic scalper would defend a toxic scalper.

      • ViRGiN

        You’re just trying to shame down scalpers, so there is less competition from you trying to make a big chunk of profit from the stupid.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        I’m pretty sure all three downvotes so far are from the same person, one with an occasionally used alt-account, the second an anonymous vote while being logged out of disqus. So at least the number of scalper supporters here is lower than it might seem.

        • MackRogers

          Yeah, what is hilarious is Ben Lang recently gloating about how great and insightful his comment section is when there are essentially 5 guys(probably multiple accounts) ruining it for everyone.

          I wonder how many educated smart commenters have just left after seeing what a shitshow this comment section is.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            There is a very easy way for everyone to improve the signal to noise ratio. For me some of the threads come with rather large “content unavailable” sections, which I consider a win.

            But it is also very apparent that most readers prefer to see everything anybody has written, including you. For some reason you have chosen to not use the options readily available from disqus, and instead regularly try to blame Ben for not imposing what you want onto everyone. If you don’t want to be annoyed by a few guys, just do something about it. It only takes a few seconds.

          • MackRogers

            The responsibility should not rest on us to filter through irrelevant content. In the comment section, especially within this specialized tech niche, maintaining a level of respect is crucial.

            This issue has a significant ripple effect, dissuading newcomers who, upon seeing the state of the comments, decide not to return. Consequently, we find ourselves stuck in a repetitive cycle of the same 15-30 commenters, limiting the diversity of experiences and expressions.

            Additionally, the use of “upvotes” and “downvotes” is not only unnecessary but also toxic, turning the comment section into a game. This gamification discourages participation, as individuals fear public scrutiny or embarrassment, particularly when wielded as a weapon by trolls.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            There are no simple technical solutions for complex human behavior. Even if everyone could agree on what is acceptable, throwing people out would just lead to them posting as guests, which cannot even be blocked, making things worse.

            I’m aware of the destructive effects. Trolls and spam are an unsolved problem, and have been for decades. The first spam mailing from 1978 could only be stopped because sending any commercial mails on ARPANET was forbidden. Today it is much harder, and what is trolling for one person is “finally someone speaking the truth” for others.

            And any voting system depends on the maturity of the participants, with Slashdot giving out random voting points based on past reputation being a rare good example, and people review bombing on Steam a bad one. What you can try is lead by example by not interacting with trolls, not attacking others personally yourself, not acknowledging those attacks from others and making sure that your comments contribute something interesting and are not based on just wishful thinking, unfounded assumptions or tribalism. The responsibility to not dissuade newcomers is with you too.

          • kool

            Ugh are you serious? If you can’t handle a comment section, how do you handle world?

          • gothicvillas

            Oh please, go somewhere else then.

        • xyzs

          Yep, I knew that it was only him :)
          It’s so pathetic that he makes multiple accounts and upvotes himself to exist. This guy is the lowest of the low. And on top of that, we just learn he’s doing scalping on the side…
          It never ceases to amaze me how close to a cockroach germ he can be.

    • david vincent

      Even less useful are advertisers and marketers, toxic billionaires like Musk, Bezos, the Koch brothers…

    • STL

      Trading with stock options is far more useless for the world and far more profitable as well.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        Stock markets are actually very useful for allowing people to participate in market growth, to provide feedback/control mechanisms for companies, to allow companies to acquire capital and provide people with money with a motivation to invest it into the economy, which usually also helps those not holding stock themselves.

        There are a lot of problems with stock markets, esp. that the primary motivation is making money, and often other costs like environmental damages or social issues aren’t priced in. But in the end stock markets are just an abstract generalization of the market that even countries claiming to be communistic base they economies on, because their level of self-regulation due to lots of participant with varying interests works so much better than a couple of people trying to decide what works best for everyone.

        If you seriously believe that stock markets are more detrimental to society and more profitable than (semi-)illegal extortion and scamming schemes, you urgently need an economy 101 course. Probably more than one.

        • STL

          Be it as it may, I make at least 20k each month with stock options (after paying taxes) and I feel not really bad about it. Generierst Du Deine Replies eigentlich mit GPT-4? Klingt ein bißchen so. Or are you just very German?

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            No, the probabilistic model of GPT-4, lacking the ability to check whether what it writes makes actual sense, still makes too many mistakes. Like the plot holes in the story of the little boy playing captain that was so happy he managed to sell his PSVR2 so he could buy a Quest 3 instead, despite being rich from all his after school trading deals.

            It’s just too obviously the hallucination of a brainless machine to be taken serious, and despite many very impressive results, LLM too often stands for Laughable Logic Mess. I’m also not happy yet with their still inadequately low levels of cynicism and sarcasm producing only pedestrian insults, so for the time being I have to rely on my limited natural capabilities, while I wait for the GPT-5 “extra snark edition”.

  • JB1968

    I’m not surprised. iSheeps will buy it even for$10000.

  • Leisure Suit Barry

    PS5 was scalped, PS Portal was scalped, Apple Vision Pro was scalped . . . PSVR2 was not scalped and piled up on store shelves

    Says all you need to know really.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      – PS5 was heavily scalped during a serious component shortage with way to few available units.

      – Apple Vision Pro is getting scalped to a very limited amount, but scalpers may already be retreating due to neither long term shortages nor ebay profits being in sight.

      – PSVR2 not being scalped surprised a few, including Sony, who apparently had provided for waiting lists in the pre-order web interface, and shortly after reduced their internal sales predictions. They may have misinterpreted people paying a lot for PS5 during shortages as a sign that their users would be fine with a USD 500+ VR HMD, which turned out to be very wrong.

      – PS Portal was the real surprise here. There were many “nice, but what’s the point?” reviews, but many buyers really liked a small screen for playing while other family members occupy the TV, allowing them to still spend time together. The USD 200 price point wasn’t an issue despite the limited use case, and it didn’t only sell out due to scalpers, but because of very high demand that Sony had seriously underestimated, causing undersized production. It would be great if they learned something for PSVR2 pricing from this.

  • STL

    I bet only a very few will really buy and use these gameless headsets anyway.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      Pretty sure your only way to win this bet is by defining “very few” as about 450K, because that’s all they can produce in 2024. This way you can still claim you were right, even if they continue to sell out all the AVP they can make, as they have done so far.

      Or you could cleverly define “really buy” as “only those buying it for playing games”, which AVP users obviously will barely care about. You’ll also have to properly define “gameless” as “only counting VR games requiring a VR controller”. Otherwise the iOS compatible AVP, which is not a VR headset, has already won, with 472,000 of the 1.81mn apps currently available on the App Store being games, more than 500 times as many as on the Quest store.

      • STL

        Let’s talkabout it in a year from now. AVP will be the new Lisa. And it will be succeeded by another XR glasses with far more features, as usual. I’m extremely frustrated by the fact that Zuck is everything doing right and Tim Cook is doing that arrogant thing Steve Jobs was doing, but without his Genius.