Entering the chat is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has more at stake than perhaps anyone on earth if Apple does to headsets what the iPhone did to smartphones. In a video posted to his Instagram account on Tuesday, Zuckerberg gives his official verdict on the Vision Pro versus his company’s latest Quest 3 headset: “I don’t just think that Quest is the better value, I think Quest is the better product, period.”
While being filmed by the Quest 3’s video passthrough system in his living room, Zuckerberg highlights the tradeoffs Apple made to get the fanciest display possible into something that can be worn on your head in an acceptable form factor. He says the Quest 3 weighs 120 grams less, making it more comfortable to wear for longer. He also says it allows for greater motion due to its lack of a wired battery pack and wider field of view than the Vision Pro.
He thinks the Quest’s option of physical hand controllers and hand tracking for input is better, though he says he’s a fan of eye tracking for some use cases and teases that it will return to future Meta headsets after debuting in the Quest Pro. He says the Quest has a better “immersive” content library than Apple, which is technically true for now, though he admits that the Vision Pro is a better entertainment device. And then there’s the fact that the Quest 3 is, as Zuck says, “like seven times less expensive.”
At the end of the video, Zuckerberg thanks his team that has been building VR headsets for a very long time — a message that seems to contain a we can rest easy, folks vibe. As I discussed with Zuckerberg recently, it’s true that Meta has a tremendous head start and will be the uncontested leader in headset sales for a while. You can even make a strong argument, as Zuckerberg does, that today, the Quest 3 is a better headset for most people than the Vision Pro.
But what Zuckerberg doesn’t say in his video is that Apple has obvious hardware and developer ecosystem advantages, the latter of which takes time to rev up with a new product category like this. Meta may be breathing a sigh of relief right now. But this is a game of endurance. And the headset wars are just beginning.
