Mark Zuckerberg Gave His Opinion On Apple's Vision Pro, And It's Not Very Flattering
Meta CEO and metaverse visionary Mark Zuckerberg has hit out at Apple's upcoming "Vision Pro" mixed-reality headset. According to The Verge, the Facebook founder highlighted fundamental differences between Apple's hardware and the products his own company produces during a company-wide meeting. One major point Zuckerberg reportedly latched onto was the price point, which Apple has set at $3,499 and up. This contrasts greatly with the very affordable, and very popular, Meta Quest 2 which is priced at $299, almost 1/12th of the price of Apple's high-end offering.
Zuckerberg also singled out the Vision Pro's intended purpose and target audience, highlighting how his platform is based on human interaction and activity, and how that supposedly contrasts with Apple's effort. Zuckerberg said "the metaverse ... is fundamentally social. It's about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer in new ways. Our device is also about being active and doing things. By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself. I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it's not the one that I want. There's a real philosophical difference in terms of how we're approaching this." However, Meta's latest major hardware release and the Vision Pro actually have a surprising amount in common.
The Vision Pro may be what Zuckerberg actually wanted
Mark Zuckerberg is correct in saying the majority of the Quest's content requires movement and has a social setting. He also has a valid point about the staggering price difference between the Vision Pro and the Quest 2, and how the Quest 2's price has allowed millions of people to try VR who would have otherwise been priced out of the platform. However, there is a high-end elephant in the room in the shape of the Meta Quest Pro.
The Quest Pro, like the Vision Pro, was billed as a high-end "work-focused" headset rather than something centering on social interaction and gaming. It also had an incredibly steep launch price. While $1,499 is significantly cheaper than Apple's Vision Pro, it is still many orders of magnitude higher than Meta's mainstream offerings. To justify the price tag, the headset included a lot of cutting-edge and high-end features, including color passthrough.
It's fair to say that the Vision Pro may be everything Zuckerberg wanted the Quest Pro to be. In terms of the Vision Pro's social side, the detailed avatars the headset will use for things like FaceTime are similar to something Meta teased a few years ago but hasn't yet produced. It's also a bit unfair to base assumptions on things like activity levels on a handful of launch trailers — especially given Apple's focus on fitness across its other devices.