At a company-wide meeting with employees today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to Apple’s Vision Pro announcement. on the edgeAlex Heath. Zuckerberg said the Vision Pro doesn’t have “magical solutions” that Meta couldn’t imagine, and is “seven times better” than its recently announced Quest 3 headset.
Apple’s announcement “really shows the difference in values and vision that our companies bring,” Zuckerberg added, noting that Meta’s goal is to make products “accessible and affordable to everyone.” The Vision Pro costs $3,499, the Quest 3 costs $499 and the Quest Pro costs $999.
According to Zuckerberg, Meta’s goal with Metaverse is “community at its core,” whereas Vision Pro seems more isolated. He acknowledged that Apple’s approach “may be a vision of the future of computing,” but “not something I like.”
Zuckerberg’s full comments are contained in the statement on the edge:
Apple finally announced their headset, so I want to talk about that for a second. I was very curious to see what they were going to send. And obviously I haven’t seen it yet, so I’ll learn more as we play with it and see what happens and how people use it.
From what I’ve seen early on, I’d say the good news is that there aren’t any magical solutions in laws and physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought about. They went with a higher resolution display, and between that and all the technology they have there to power it, it costs seven times more, now requires more power, and now you need a battery and a wire attached to it to use it. They made that design trade off and it makes sense for the cases they go through.
But look, I think their announcement really shows the difference in values and the vision that our organizations bring to this in a way that I think is really, really important. We innovate to ensure our products are as accessible and affordable to everyone as possible, and this is a core part of what we do. We’ve sold tens of millions of searches.
Most importantly, the metaverse and our vision of existence is fundamentally social. It’s about people communicating in new ways and being close in new ways. Our device is to be active and get things done. In contrast, every demo they showed was of themselves sitting on a couch. I mean, maybe that’s a vision of the future of computing, but it’s not one I like. There is a real philosophical difference in how we approach this. Seeing what they were doing and how they were going to compete made me more excited and in many ways made me believe that what we are doing is important and going to be successful. But it will be a fun ride.
A few days before WWDC, Meta previewed its next-generation mixed reality headset, the Quest 3. Launching later this year, the headset features a 40% slimmer and more comfortable design, a higher-resolution display and up to twice the graphics performance of the Quest 2. The headset will start at $499 with 128GB of storage, and the company plans to. to share more details about it at an event on September 27.
Apple says the Vision Pro will be available in the US in early 2024.
