Mark Zuckerberg Takes Dig at Apple's VR Headset

Couch Potato

After profoundly missing the mark — forgive us — by burning up $15 billion in his quest to push the metaverse, Meta-formerly-Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken a dig at Apple's recently-announced Vision Pro mixed-reality headset.

During a rare companywide meeting, Zuckerberg told employees that Meta is still way ahead of Apple, as The Verge reports.

Zuckerberg's argument: people will want to hang out with other humans while wearing bulky headsets together, rather than Apple's more solipsistic concept.

"By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself," he told employees, referring to Apple's announcement earlier this week. "I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want."

Glass Houses

The uncomfortable reality, however, is that Meta has largely floundered in its efforts to bring the tech to the wider public. And that's despite the fact that the company has been selling headsets for a tiny fraction of what Apple will charge for its Vision Pro headset, a staggering $3,499.

While the company has sold around 20 million Quest VR headsets so far, as The Verge reported in February, they've failed to achieve much cultural capital.

To stop the social media company from bottoming out, Zuckerberg has had to make some deep changes, including mass layoffs, while significantly easing off of his obsession with the metaverse, a vision of a half-baked metaphysical playground that has yet to be compellingly realized.

In other words, should Apple really take advice from Zuckerberg when it comes to how it should market its own — albeit astronomically expensive — headset?

Renewed Optimism

In his remarks, Zuckerberg doubled down, telling employees that "our vision for the metaverse and presence is fundamentally social."

Worst of all, the CEO is using this perceived "philosophical difference" as a source of motivation to push ahead.

"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," he said.

Whether that kind of renewed optimism is going to sit well with Meta's investors, who have long scoffed at and rallied against Zuckerberg's obsession with the metaverse, is uncertain at best.

But if there's one thing that Zuckerberg has arguably been willing to do in order to demonstrate his conviction — something that Apple's CEO Tim Cook somehow still hasn't done — it's that he's willing to be seen wearing a headset.

More on the headset: Apple Execs Seem Terrified of Being Photographed Weathing Dorky AR Headset