> "Comments here" will tell you the Quest is a failed product after 20 million units sold. The people on this website have never been representative of the market at-large.

It's amazing how many people miss this crucial point. Apple and Meta share a high level ambition – to dominate the next wave of computing platform -- but that's pretty much the only similarity between them.

If you look at Quest and Vision Pro and think about the constraints placed on the teams building them it seems like:

1. Apple's teams are given the constraint of producing an amazing user experience in terms of screens, gesture control, etc. Price flexes upwards to deliver this.

2. Meta's teams are given the constraint of achieving a mass market price, and the quality of the product flexes down to achieve this.

Apple's position makes sense to me. They are no longer an underdog[^1] and can fast follow anyone who has a more compelling vision for AR/VR which launches before they get theirs out the door.

Meta needed to get this going before Apple for obvious reasons. That's why, for example, of the 20 million units you referred to as being sold, 5 million of them (!) had safety recall notices because the fabric of one of the components caused such serious skin irritation that some number of users were hospitalised.

Meta can move fast and break things (& people), but Apple can't do that any more. (No judgement of either company.)

That all makes sense… but the bit I can't fathom is why Facebook didn't take the approach of building from the high end down? I don't know of any complex consumer electronics or hardware companies which don't take the approach of launching massively expensive "pro" hardware which is the beachhead for driving down price over time. E.g. autofocus in cameras began life on the giant cameras which sports photographers used to use, but over time it became cheap enough to manufacture that all cameras shipped with it.

Do you think Meta genuinely thought they were just a few years away from delivering a mass market-ready device (for playing BeatSabre and talking to cartoon versions of your friends)?

My guess is that Meta saw themselves as being curators of the best bits of the existing AR/VR proposition: tie all the best bits of the existing field of hardware and software companies and put them into a package at a $400 price point. Just iterate on the existing ideas a bit and focus on getting the price down.

Apple seems to have looked at the existing ideas around UX (input and screen quality especially) and scope (what do I use this for?) and decided that there needed to be dramatically different (better, in Apple's view) solutions.

Given Meta's internal rhetoric about Quest not retaining users, I'd say Apple was wise to approach this from first principles. But I really don't know what Meta has been working on for so long?

If I think back to the original iPhone launch, it made literally every other phone on the market look preposterously antiquated (to the point that RIM execs famously believed it was "impossible" for Apple to actually be delivering the phone they demoed). Vision Pro does that to the Vive Pro gathering dust in my cupboard, but I'll need to use one to say for sure whether it does the same to the Quest 3. My hunch is that the disparity isn't as huge as it was with cell phones, but it doesn't seem like Facebook can simply ignore Vision Pro and continue with their current product roadmap: I would bet on Apple (a hardware company with a lot of scale advantages) figuring out how to make the baseline experience achieved with Vision Pro cheaper for a consumer device much faster and more easily than Facebook will figure out how to achieve that same baseline experience starting from their $400 price point.

Wdyt?

[^1]: Inside Apple around the time iTV / Apple TV was introduced, it was characterised as a "foot in the door": Steve Jobs kept calling it a "hobby" in public, and the strategy changed around a lot. Since then they've introduced several products which have either seen strategy shift over time (iPadOS multi tasking…) or which were known to be a "foot in the door" (Apple Watch), but they don't acknowledge them as such, they just pretend that the plan all along was for Apple Watch to be a fitness tracker, and that they did not in fact spend 30 minutes of the keynote talking about sending digital heartbeats to each other as if it was the most meaningful thing ever.