The redesigned Oculus Quest was unveiled by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the Facebook F8 Conference at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California.
The CEO of Meta, in a post on Threads on Friday, engaged in a message conversation with Benedict Evans, a partner at Mosaic Ventures. He pointed out that Apple’s VR headgear has “tradeoffs” that, in his opinion, make it inferior to Meta’s $500 rival, Quest.
Evans wrote the initial reaction, writing, “There are a lot of limitations to the Vision Pro, but I am genuinely baffled by Meta VR engineers claiming it’s ‘basically just the same thing’ as the Quest.” “Apple is essentially selling the product that Meta hopes to have in three to five years. At the price Apple hopes to attain in three to five years, The Quest is on sale.”
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“I don’t think we’re saying the devices are the same,” he responded. “We claim that Quest is better. We will have significantly regressed if our devices weigh the same as theirs in three to five years, if they exhibit motion blur, lack precision inputs, etc.
“Yes, they have a higher resolution, but they paid for that with many other product tradeoffs that, for the most part, make their device worse,” Zuckerberg continued. We don’t work for that.”
Apple and Meta representatives did not immediately reply to Business Insider’s requests for comment.
Compared to Meta, which sold 20 million Quest headsets between its 2019 launch and February of last year, Apple has sold more over 200,000 Vision Pro units since the headset went on purchase. The company’s Reality Labs division had its revenue exceed $1 billion for the first time in 2023’s fourth quarter financials, a development that Meta credited to “Quest having a strong holiday season.”
In their after conversation, Evans and Zuckerberg talked about the advantages and disadvantages of Apple’s device’s higher resolution. Zuck concluded by stating that Apple’s decision to skip the higher resolution in favor of improved ergonomics and motion blur wasn’t “a clear win,” particularly “when Quest’s resolution is also quite good.”
The criticism that Zuckerberg has leveled at Apple’s Vision Pro on social media on Friday is not new. At a corporate meeting, he criticized the headphones by telling Meta staff that Apple’s idea of a VR headset is “not the one I want.” He also gave the product a critical review on Instagram, critiquing everything from price to specs.