One of the latest battlegrounds in Apple and Meta’s feud is their work on virtual and augmented reality.
Apple released its Vision Pro headset in February 2024, and Zuckerberg was quick to offer his critique of the competitor to Meta’s Quest headsets.
“I have to say that before this, I expected that Quest would be the better value for most people since it’s really good and like seven times less expensive, but after using [Vision Pro] I don’t just think that Quest is the better value, it’s the better product, period,” Zuckerberg said in a video on Threads. “They have different strengths, but overall Quest is better for the vast majority of things that people use mixed reality for.”
Zuckerberg says many people “assumed that Vision Pro would be higher quality because it’s Apple and it costs $3,000 more.”
“I know that some fanboys get upset whenever anyone dares to question if Apple’s going to be the leader in a new category,” he said. “But the reality is that every generation of computing has an open and a closed model. And yeah, in mobile, Apple’s closed model won, but it’s not always that way.”
In Meta’s first quarter earnings call in April, Zuckerberg said he didn’t think AR glasses would find mainstream success without “full holographic displays.”
“I still think that that’s going to be awesome and is the long-term mature state for the product,” he said. “But now, it seems pretty clear that there’s also a meaningful market for fashionable AI glasses without a display.”
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has also taken shots at Apple over its Vision Pro.
“As soon as I put the headset on, I can see what trade-offs they made and why they made them. And, perhaps definitionally, those aren’t the trade-offs I would have made,” he said.
Bosworth called the Vision Pro’s motion blur “really distracting” and said the headset was “very uncomfortable to use.”
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