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Oct 13, 2023

Meta's Zuckerberg jabs at Apple headset demos and price, report says

FILE: Mark Zuckerberg wears a virtual reality headset at an Oculus developers

FILE: Mark Zuckerberg wears a virtual reality headset at an Oculus developers conference in San Jose on Oct. 6, 2016. Meta, with nine years in the headset market, will now compete with the Apple Vision Pro.

After Apple unveiled its highly anticipated Vision Pro mixed reality headset Monday, it was only a matter of time before Silicon Valley's foremost headset enthusiast got his hands on a microphone.

During a major Meta all-hands meeting on Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg spoke at the company's Menlo Park headquarters to thousands of employees watching in person and streaming in from around the world, the New York Times reported. He defended the company's recent layoffs and outlined its artificial intelligence ambitions, and he yielded the stage to fellow executives to chat up Instagram Reels and Meta's in-the-works Twitter competitor, reports say.

But the billionaire couldn't resist a few jabs at Apple's new Vision Pro, announced just a half-hour's drive southeast during the tech titan's Worldwide Developers Conference at its Cupertino headquarters.

"Apple finally announced their headset, so I want to talk about that for a second," he started. The Verge published Zuckerberg's full remarks. "I was really curious to see what they were gonna ship."

Meta purchased headset-maker Oculus VR in 2014, and since 2016, it has rolled out a series of the immersive devices, originally focusing on video game functionality. But over the past two years, the firm has aimed bigger, dumping billions of dollars into building out Zuckerberg's "metaverse" — he changed Facebook's name to Meta in 2021 and started evangelizing about "the successor to the mobile internet," a headset-enabled virtual world for working, gaming and socializing.

The products have kept coming. Meta introduced its high-end Quest Pro in October and announced the $500 Quest 3 on June 1, preempting Apple's announcement and providing some sticker-shock contrast: The Vision Pro will start at $3,499 once sales commence next year, while the Quest Pro has been priced down to $999.

Onstage, Zuckerberg called out the price and the Vision Pro's battery pack, saying Apple made a "design trade-off" and that the announcement "showcases the difference in the values and vision" between the companies.

"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," he continued. "And we have sold tens of millions of Quests."

He also poked at the way Apple is presenting its new hardware, with demonstrations that have featured people watching movies, scrolling through huge, floating internet tabs, and chatting with hovering FaceTime windows.

"[Our vision's] about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer in new ways. Our device is also about being active and doing things," Zuckerberg reportedly said. "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."

It was a bold statement from a man whose promotions for virtual reality once involved a livestream in which his cartoon avatar high-fived a colleague atop images of a Puerto Rican landscape recently devastated by Hurricane Maria.

Zuckerberg knows that initial impressions of the new platform are important; the discussions about his company's early forays into the immersive virtual world did not focus on the computing breakthroughs or possible societywide effects. Instead, Zuckerberg's floating avatar was broadly mocked for its leglessness — legs, he’d later say, became the "most requested feature on our roadmap." In one promotional video, Meta even subbed in a leg "preview" with motion-captured animations.

Though the companies have had their share of high-profile spats (including Apple's iOS privacy push, which Meta said would cost its businesses $10 billion in 2022), the uncertain VR market will host the first product fight between the two Bay Area tech titans. Zuckerberg said he's excited, and he seems raring to go. Apple, on the other hand, doesn't even deign to call its product a headset — the company would rather we think of it as a "spatial computer."

Hear of anything happening at Meta or Apple? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at [email protected] or on Signal at 628-204-5452.

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