Mark Zuckerberg says he tried Apple Vision Pro, but he doesn't seem impressed.
In a three-and-a-half-minute video posted to his Instagram page, the Meta CEO gave his review of Apple’s headset and his comparison to Meta’s own Quest 3.
Zuckerberg didn‘t seem impressed with Vision Pro, stating that while he previously expected that Quest 3 would just offer better value than Vision Pro, after using it he now believes Quest 3 is outright “the better product, period” because it’s “better for the vast majority of things that people use mixed reality for”, claiming he was actually surprised to discover this.
Zuckerberg first pointed to the fact that Quest 3 has “precision controllers” that are “great for games” and enable an immersive content library that’s “a lot deeper”.
To clearly showcase that Quest 3 too has color passthrough, Zuckerberg said his video was shot on a Quest 3 by a person sitting in front of him wearing one. And he pointed out that Quest 3 too can overlay giant virtual screens to its passthrough, yet does this while being 120 grams lighter with “no wires that get in the way” and a wider field of view. He also pointed out that while Vision Pro’s displays have impressive resolution, they have a motion blur tradeoff.
One aspect of Vision Pro Zuckerberg did seem to praise without a caveat was the eye tracking, calling it “really nice” and saying it enables a “nice interface”.
“We actually had those sensors in Quest Pro. We took them out for Quest 3, and we’re going to bring them back in the future,” Zuckerberg said, but it's unclear which future headsets this refers to.
As a preemptive response to those who disagree with his take, Zuckerberg suggested “some fanboys get upset whenever anyone dares to question if Apple’s going to be the leader in a new category.”
(I’m sure BlackBerry and Nokia said much the same about the iPhone, though.)
He ended the video by saying that while Apple’s closed model won in mobile, this isn’t always the case as Microsoft’s more open model of Windows won for PCs. And he again, as he has done multiple times in the past, pitched Meta Quest as the open alternative in spatial computing to the closed Apple Vision - though there are multiple problems with this positioning.
David Heaney
Meta’s next headset will reportedly be “Quest 3 Lite” this year, a budget headset priced to replace Quest 2, but it’s also reportedly working with LG on a high-end Quest Pro successor for 2025. Despite Zuckerberg seeming unfazed by Vision Pro, it’ll be fascinating to see to what degree Meta’s hardware and software over the next few years is inspired by what Apple just delivered.
