Zuck once again bashes the Apple headphones.
Even Mark Zuckerberg has talked publicly about his disapproval of Apple's Vision Pro.
For the second time in as many Friday threads, he panned the VR goggles.
When it comes to Apple's Vision Pro, Mark Zuckerberg is relentless.
In a thread that went live on Friday, the CEO of Meta and a partner at Mosaic Ventures, Benedict Evans, argued that Apple's $3,500 virtual reality headset had "tradeoffs" that made it inferior to Meta's $500 Quest.
As for the argument that the Vision Pro is "basically just the same thing" as the Quest, "I am genuinely baffled by Meta VR engineers claiming it's a lot of limitations apart from that," Evans commented, which prompted the first reaction. The product that Meta aims to attain in three to five years is selling like hotcakes at Apple. At the pricing point that Apple aims to achieve in three to five years, the Quest is selling well.
Nothing was going to sway Zuck.
"I don't think we're saying the devices are the same," said he. We're arguing that Quest is superior. We will have gone backwards a long way if, in three to five years, our gadgets are as heavy as theirs, exhibit motion blur like theirs, lack precise inputs, etc.
In addition, Zuckerberg said that although their resolution is greater, the device's overall quality is negatively impacted due to several other product considerations. No, that is not our goal.
Meta and Apple representatives were slow to reply when Business Insider reached out to them for comment.
Compared to Meta's 20 million Quest devices sold between its introduction in 2019 and February of last year, Apple has sold over 200,000 Vision Pro units since the headset became available for presale in January. Meta said that its Reality Labs business had their first ever sales of over $1 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023. The firm credited this milestone to "Quest having a strong holiday season."
In their ongoing discussion, Zuckerberg and Evans weighed the pros and cons of Apple's higher resolution vs other devices'. Zuck concluded that, given Quest's resolution is also quite good, Apple's decision to sacrifice resolution for improved ergonomics and motion blur was not "a clear win."
Zuckerberg has made a number of derogatory remarks against Apple's Vision Pro, the most recent of which were Friday's social media statements. At a corporate meeting, he told Meta staff that Apple's concept of a virtual reality headset is "not the one I want." He also posted a critical review of the product on Instagram, where he raked it over all aspects, including pricing and specifications.