Four days before Apple entered, and redefined, the nascent extended-reality (XR) headset market by going far, far beyond merely that with an entirely new platform, ushering in spatial computing, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms pre-announced the latest version of its Quest mixed-reality headset in a panic.
Meta executives were likely dismayed over the positive reception for Apple’s headset innovations. The maker of the Quest VR devices has already lost tens of billions of dollars in projects tied to the metaverse inside its Reality Labs unit. And when the company launched its $1,500 Meta Quest Pro last October, it was criticized for lack of innovation. Management cut the price by $500 to $1,000 in subsequent months.
The main problem for Meta is that it lacks Apple’s advantages in custom-design chip prowess and ownership of a dominant mobile operating system. Meta relies on third-party chip suppliers like Qualcomm, whose semiconductor designs are far behind Apple’s. Meta also lacks the large ecosystem surrounding Apple’s iPhone App Store, a vast library of software that developers can easily port over to the Vision Pro.
Mass adoption may be years away for the AR/VR market. But this week’s product announcement shows the category is now Apple’s to lose.
The unfortunate reality for Meta is that they seem completely out-classed on the hardware front. Yes, Apple is working with a 7x advantage in price, which certainly contributes to things like superior resolution, but that bit about the deep integration between Apple’s own silicon and its custom-made operating system are going to very difficult to replicate for a company that has (correctly) committed to an Android-based OS and a Qualcomm-designed chip.
One of Apple’s biggest advancements with Vision Pro is eliminating handheld controllers and, in doing so, making every so-called rival’s VR headset look like a horse and buggy in comparison, but the main thing is that Vision Pro is not a “VR headset” or “AR headset” or whatever. It’s a computer. A “spatial computer,” to be precise.
— SteveJack, MacDailyNews, June 6, 2023
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote a week ago about Meta’s panicky pre-announcement:
Shades of Ballmer’s flop-sweat-submerged “reveal” of “HP slate” vaporware just ahead of Apple’s iPad unveiling.
Zuckerberg’s panic has, in one fell swoop, removed any reason for whatever potential buyers he had to buy Meta’s “Quest 2” headset (Osborne Effect) just as Apple is about to appropriate all of the planet’s AR/VR/XR air until Christmas and beyond. It was the absolute worst move he could have made and Apple, without a peep, pushed him into making it. 
Enjoy your lead in the VR headset market, Meta, because it’s about to evaporate forever, just like your user-tracking advertising revenue.
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The post Meta’s quixotic Quest cannot compete with Apple’s Vision Pro appeared first on MacDailyNews.
