Ever since its announcement on Monday (5th June), the tech industry has been buzzing around the Apple Vision Pro. The first mixed-reality headset from the Cupertino company, the ‘spatial computer’ is due out next year starting from a lofty $3,499. Apple’s main competitor in the space is Meta, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn’t fazed by the Apple Vision Pro a new report suggests.
As reported by The Verge, the CEO held a company-wide meeting this week with Vision Pro a major talking point. He found that Apple’s presentation offered “no kind of magical solutions” to the difficulties of this technology. And that because of its feature set, “it costs seven times more” than the upcoming Quest 3 headset.
He also noted the “difference in the values and the vision” between both companies. Quest headsets are “about being active and doing things” whilst all Apple showed “was a person sitting on a couch by themself.” He goes onto say: “I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want.”
Mark Zuckerberg on Apple Vision Pro
Here’s the full transcript regarding what Zuckerberg reportedly said:
“Apple finally announced their headset, so I want to talk about that for a second. I was really curious to see what they were gonna ship. And obviously I haven’t seen it yet, so I’ll learn more as we get to play with it and see what happens and how people use it.
From what I’ve seen initially, I’d say the good news is that there’s no kind of magical solutions that they have to any of the constraints on laws of physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of. 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.
But look, I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important. We innovate to make sure that our products are as accessible and affordable to everyone as possible, and that is a core part of what we do. And we have sold tens of millions of Quests.
More importantly, our vision for the metaverse and presence 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. And seeing what they put out there and how they’re going to compete just made me even more excited and in a lot of ways optimistic that what we’re doing matters and is going to succeed. But it’s going to be a fun journey.”
Do you agree with him considering the price points and use cases? Were you more interested in the Meta Quest 3 announcement? Let us know in the comments below.