Photo by Adi Robertson / The Verge
A Korean news report suggests Meta is partnering with LG to release a successor to its high-end Quest Pro virtual reality headset in 2025. As spotted by UploadVR, Maeil Business Newspaper writes that Meta has struck a deal for a joint venture with LG. The resulting headset is rumored to be priced at around $2,000 and use LG displays, as well as other parts from LG subsidiaries like LG Innotek. Maeil Business Newspaper furthermore claims Meta will release a low-end Quest headset in 2024 that could cost under $200.
Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Verge, and some of the details of the report seem unintuitive. $200 would be a major price drop for the consumer Quest; the Quest 2 sells for $299 after Meta briefly attempted to raise the price, and the upcoming Quest 3 was announced at $499. The report also says the new high-end headset will be called the “Meta Quest 4 Pro,” which would break Meta’s current convention of keeping the Quest and Quest Pro lineup numbering separate.
Conversely, $2,000 would be about twice the price of the Meta-manufactured Quest Pro, which launched at $1,499 and then dropped to $999 — but the report believably suggests Meta will be positioning the new high-end Quest against Apple’s $3,499 Vision Pro headset, which wasn’t around when the Quest Pro launched.
Overall, however, the report tracks roughly with Meta’s past behavior in the VR space. Although $200 would be very cheap, The Verge has previously reported that a cheap headset codenamed Ventura is indeed planned for 2024, with a Quest Pro successor likely after that. And as UploadVR notes, Meta (formerly Facebook) has released several headsets as joint-branded products. The Oculus Rift S bore Lenovo branding, the low-end Oculus Go was manufactured by Xiaomi, and Samsung made the mobile Gear VR.
That said, it’s worth pointing out that none of these were considered the most exciting Meta/Facebook headsets at the time of their release, which is contrary to how Meta has positioned the Quest Pro. The Rift S was Meta’s final wired-only headset before it focused entirely on the all-in-one Quest lineup, the Go was a low-end Rift and Quest alternative, and the Gear VR was a super-cheap alternative to the then-cutting-edge Rift. (A counter-example may be Meta’s high-profile partnership with Ray-Ban on smart glasses, but Meta also described that as an early foray into augmented reality.) Meta has portrayed the Pro as a testing ground for innovative VR tech that will come more slowly to its cheaper mass-market products. An LG joint venture could maintain that role, but only if it looks a little different from some of those past partnerships.
