After WWDC 2023 and the presentation of the Apple Vision Pro , Mark Zuckerberg downplayed its presence in the market, pointing out that the next generation of Meta Quest will be more massive.
Apple has managed to attract the attention of the technological world with the new Vision Pro, the mixed reality headset presented at WWDC 2023 . However, the Cupertino brand did not mention the phrase “metaverse” at any time, taking care of its references to the virtual environments that Meta and other companies firmly push. This, evidently, has not gone down well with Mark Zuckerberg , CEO of Meta , who has expressed his opinion about the new Apple gadget in a meeting with employees.
According to The Verge , a medium that had access to the details of the meeting, Zuckerberg did not highlight any important progress in relation to what Meta is currently investigating: ” From what I have seen initially, I would say that the good news is that there is no no kind of magic solution they have for any of the constraints of the laws of physics that our teams haven’t explored and thought about yet.”
From the Meta headquarters, Zuckerberg mentioned that Apple’s new team only focuses on people sitting on a couch, and that “that could be the vision of the future of computing, but it’s not the one I want.” For the creator of Facebook, the idea is to allow mixed reality devices to allow greater user activity and allow new interactions between people.
“It costs seven times more”
Another of the outstanding factors of the meeting between the employees of Meta and Zuckerberg was the price of the Apple Vision Pro, available for the first part of 2024. Mark Zuckerberg emphasized energy demand, a variable that Meta seems to have already evaluated. :
“They went with a higher resolution screen, and between that and all the technology they put in there to power it, it costs seven times as much and now it requires so much power that you now need a battery and a cable attached to use it. They made that design compromise and it might make sense for the cases they’re looking at,” Zuckerberg said.
For Meta, the importance of its presence in the metaverse segment and experiences under mixed reality is based on the massive access to these tools, and highlighted the need to maintain an affordable price fence: “I think your ad really shows 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 our products are as accessible and affordable as possible for everyone, and that’s a core part of what we do. And we have sold tens of millions of Quests.”
Meta points to other directions
Since rebranding Facebook to Meta in 2021, the company’s mission is to “make the world more open and connected.” The parent brand of Instagram, WhatsApp and other digital environments has been a leader in the development of virtual and augmented reality technology with the Oculus Quest 2 headset.
In addition to hardware, Meta is investing heavily in the metaverse. The company has earmarked $10 billion to fund its development, though it remains to be seen whether it will succeed in its efforts to build and implement it as a sustainable business.