Today on the 5: Meta has apparently decided not to pursue a high end mixed reality headset that was meant to compete with the Apple Vision Pro. The most likely reasons for that move make me wonder whether they were ever going to build it in the first place.
Ozone Nightmare
Bailing On A Long Shot
Welcome to daily five for Monday, September 9th, 2024. Thanks to reporting from the website the information, which I can't link directly to because they have a paywall, but I will link to one of the many sites that re-reported their reporting, but I wanted to give credit to the original. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is apparently abandoning their plans to make a high-end VR AR headset that would have been aiming to compete with the Apple Vision Pro. Now this headset was apparently planned to come out in 2027, so around three years from now, and Meta was aiming to somehow create something that was comparable to the Apple Vision Pro for under $1,000. And there's kind of two schools of thought on why they are abandoning these plans. One is that they simply could not figure out how to do it, meaning they could not figure out how to or they did not see a projected reduction in parts prices that would allow them to make a competitive headset for under $1,000. That's one school of thought. The other one says that they looked around, saw that the Apple Vision Pro did not reinvigorate or bring on a new VR AR Renaissance, and they've decided they'll stick with their successful Meta Quest line that has around a $500 price tag, and has been generally pretty well received in virtually every iteration. I have seen a lot of positive reviews outside of the fact that Meta is the company making it, everybody seems to enjoy who's in that space the Quest headset. They generally agree it is a very good headset, or at least good enough for the amount of money you're paying. Whereas the Apple Vision Pro, which I believe is still between $35 and $3,800, I don't think it's ever gone on sale in any way, and I don't think it's going to because Apple's just not producing that many of them if they're still producing them at all. I think they're still making them but more limited numbers. That is a far higher price tag that even the most enthusiastic reviews I saw about this device, all really were focused on the hardware and almost all of them had to caveat to some degree that most people were not going to buy this, and there really wasn't a reason for most people to buy it. Either way you look at Meta's decision, it didn't make sense either side well. I guess if they were hoping that they could draft on Apple's Invigoration of the Space or in VR Renaissance, I guess that maybe this thing was, you do have to at some point when you get these rumors questioned whether these companies were really all that far along. Did they make this announcement to stabilize their stock price or at least make the market think that they were paying attention but they never really planned to make this unless there was a surprise and Apple did manage to get people really excited about VR. That feels the most right to me because the idea that they were going to make a headset for under $1,000 even three years from now that would compete with the Vision Pro, that would assume that Apple stood still and didn't keep making a better product. The reality is even the most negative reviews of the Vision Pro generally do acknowledge as they should that Apple's hardware is rock solid. I mean that's something even of my criticism to Apple. I always say their hardware is outstanding and that's generally what I've seen and read and heard about the Vision Pro is whatever the problems with the actual space itself and getting people to adopt and use these headsets, the headsets themselves are very well made. So the idea that meta was going to somehow make something that would be where you would actually look at both of them on a somewhat equal footing or with minor differences for more than a third of the price off or for a third less than a third of the price just seems insane. It does not seem like it's grounded in reality. So I think what makes sense is that they were hoping that there would be a huge upswing in interest in VR because understandably when Apple enters a category generally people suddenly flock to it. There have been rare cases where they haven't. This is one of them because I just think VR is not one of those things that is going to penetrate for general people. A phone, a tablet, a computer, those are easy but a VR headset is such a specific thing that even Apple somewhat unsurprisingly has not been able to crack the popularity code on that. I think meta was never really intending to make one of these things or not for the price they said. They could always have said later, "Well, we were aiming for $100,000 but the reality of the parts and to keep it at high quality we had to make it X number of dollars." That I can believe but the idea that they were really looking at a sub $1,000 headset to compete with the Vision Pro, yeah I don't believe that for a second. I think that they were banking on Apple somehow making this category get hot and now if that hasn't happened just going back to what they know works which makes sense later.