Meta's Rebuttal: Zuckerberg Sets Out Plan as Vision Pro Captures VR Market

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has his game face on following the unveiling of the Vision Pro – and he isn’t fazed by Apple’s “difference in values.” 

In a company-wide meeting with Meta employees, the CEO said that Apple’s device did not present any "magical solutions” in the technology that Meta hadn’t “already explored,” and that its vision for how people will use the device was “not the one I want.”

“I think 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,” Zuckerberg told employees, who were gathered at the company’s Menlo Park, California.

The Facebook co-founder added that Meta’s “vision for the metaverse and presence is fundamentally social,” with “people interacting in new ways and feeling closer.”  Apple’s technology, by contrast, encourages isolation, he believes. 

“Every demo that [Apple] showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself,” he said of Apple’s WWDC unveiling earlier this week. “I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but it’s not the one that I want.”

One step ahead

Zuckerberg also pointed to the Vision Pro’s hefty $3,499 price tag, which he believes will give Meta an opening to reach users with the upcoming Quest 3 sitting costing $3,000 less at $499. 

“There’s no kind of magical solution that they have to any of the constraints on laws of physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of,” Zuck said. 

“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.

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Despite Zuck’s confidence that the Vision Pro will fail to capture Meta’s share of the VR and AR market, the CEO has made sure to always be one step ahead of Apple’s developments. 

Meta announced the Quest 3, its next-generation mixed reality headset, just days before Apple’s WWDC event despite it not launching until early next year, just before the estimated launch of the vision pro.   

A metaverse rev(r)ival 

There’s no doubt that Apple marks a major competitive threat for Meta, which has been trying to position itself as a leader in the VR and AR space for years now. 

Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta for this exact purpose in a bid to show the world his determination to make the metaverse a reality. 

But while Meta has found early success in VR gaming but has struggled to reach the higher-end and general enterprise market that Apple appears to be gunning for. 

Mark Zuckerberg letting out a huge sigh of relief as he learns Apple also hasn’t figured out legs yet pic.twitter.com/iriFovgvt4

— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) June 5, 2023

Meta’s last headset, the meta quest pro for inst, was largely seen as a failure, forcing Meta to drop prices in a last-ditch attempt to get the enterprise-targetted tech off the shelves. 

And with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the rise of AI over the past few months, it seemed that Meta was fighting a losing battle as eyes moved away from the metaverse towards AI developments.

In this sense, Apple’s announcement may be beneficial for Zuckerberg, who no matter what tech Meta brought out, has struggled to garner the public’s attention to the metaverse. 

Apple has done that for him. 

Zuckerberg’s full comments, as reported by The Verge: 

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 on 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.