In a company-wide meeting, Mark Zuckerberg gave Meta employees his take on Apple Vision Pro.
The meeting took place earlier today in person for some staff and was video streamed to others. That stream seems to have leaked to The Verge’s Alex Heath, who said he watched the meeting and transcribed it.
Zuckerberg claimed the “good news” was that Apple has “no kind of magical solutions” to the problems of AR/VR hardware design that Meta’s engineers and researchers “haven’t already explored and thought of”.
He acknowledged Apple Vision Pro‘s higher resolution and “all the technology they put in there” but pointed the trade-offs this forces: the need for a tethered battery and a price point seven times higher than Meta’s recently announced Quest 3.
Zuckerberg went on to suggest there’s a “real philosophical difference” between Apple’s vision for AR/VR and his. He claimed Meta wants to deliver “fundamentally social” headsets at prices most people can afford that focus on “being active and doing things”, while Apple instead pitched “a person sitting on a couch by themself”. He admits Apple’s approach “could be the vision of the future of computing” but said “it’s not the one that I want”.
“And we have sold tens of millions of Quests”, he reassured Meta staff.
Zuckerberg finished by claiming seeing Apple Vision Pro’s announcement made him “even more excited and in a lot of ways optimistic that what we’re doing matters and is going to succeed”.
Here were his full comments, according to Heath:
“Apple finally announced their headset, so I want to talk about that for a second. I was really curious to see what they were gonna ship. And obviously I haven’t seen it yet, so I’ll learn more as we get to play with it and see what happens and how people use it.
From what I’ve seen initially, I’d say the good news is that there’s no kind of magical solutions that they have to any of the constraints or laws and physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of. They went with a higher resolution display, and between that and all the technology they put in there to power it, it costs seven times more and now requires so much energy that now you need a battery and a wire attached to it to use it. They made that design trade-off and it might make sense for the cases that they’re going for.
But look, I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important. We innovate to make sure that our products are as accessible and affordable to everyone as possible, and that is a core part of what we do. And we have sold tens of millions of Quests.
More importantly, our vision for the metaverse and presence is fundamentally social. It’s about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer in new ways. Our device is also about being active and doing things. By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself. I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want. There’s a real philosophical difference in terms of how we’re approaching this. And seeing what they put out there and how they’re going to compete just made me even more excited and in a lot of ways optimistic that what we’re doing matters and is going to succeed. But it’s going to be a fun journey.”
