Facebook Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had some interesting thoughts on Apple’s new Vision Pro headset — a headset that appears to be in competition with Meta’s upcoming Quest 3.
While the Vision Pro headset certainly looks neat, Zuckerberg seems to think otherwise, telling employees at a company-wide meeting that the headset didn’t have any “kind of magical solutions” that Meta hadn’t already explored. Moreover, Zuckerberg said the Vision Pro could be a “vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one I want.”
The Verge detailed Zuckerberg’s comments, publishing the CEO’s full remarks from the meeting — you can read those here. In short, Zuckerberg thinks that the Vision Pro and Quest 3 represent different values and claimed that Meta’s vision is “fundamentally social,” while Apple’s Vision Pro demos showed “a person sitting on a couch by themself.”
The thing is, I’m not sure the Quest 3 is really all that social. Whichever headset you go with, you’re still strapping a hunk of tech to your face to escape from the real world into a digital one. Sure, maybe you’re spending time in the digital world socializing with people, but you’ll probably be doing that while sitting alone on your couch in the real world.
One comment Zuckerberg made that did have some merit was about the cost. The Quest 3 headset will cost $689.99 CAD in Canada and $499.99 USD in the U.S. Apple’s Vision Pro headset doesn’t have Canadian pricing and is set to launch in the U.S. first at $3,499 USD — $3,000 more than Meta’s headset (or about $4,700 CAD).
“They went with a higher resolution display, and between that and all the technology they put in there to power it, it costs seven times more and now requires so much energy that now you need a battery and a wire attached to it to use it. They made that design trade-off, and it might make sense for the cases that they’re going for,” Zuckerberg said in the meeting.
Zuckerberg went on to say that Meta innovated to make its headset as “accessible and affordable to everyone as possible.” $689.99 is certainly more affordable than $4,700, but it will definitely be interesting to see how the two headsets stack up once they’re available to the public. Will the premium experience of the Vision Pro justify the increased cost? That remains to be seen. But for anyone looking to get into the VR/AR game at a lower cost, the Quest 3 will be a much more enticing option.
Image credit: Shutterstock
Source: The Verge
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