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Meta’s Zuckerberg dismisses Apple Vision Pro; ‘not the one that I want’
Thursday, June 8, 2023 6:26 pm

In all-hands meeting and email to employees, Meta CEO says that the Apple Vision Pro is “not the one that I want,” and “there’s no kind of magical solutions… that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of.”

Jon Swartz for MarketWatch:

In an all-hands meeting Thursday, Meta Platforms Inc.’s chief executive played down the significance of Apple’s play for the mixed-reality world, a market that prompted Facebook to change its corporate name and plunge into the field with its Quest goggles.

“From what I’ve seen initially, I’d say the good news is that there’s no kind of magical solutions that they have to any of the constraints on laws and physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of,” he said in comments that were also emailed to Meta employees, according to multiple news reports that MarketWatch independently confirmed Wednesday.

“Every demo that they [Apple] showed [at the WWDC event on Monday] was a person sitting on a couch by themselves,” Zuckerberg dismissively said. “I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want.”

MacDailyNews Take: Hopelessly outclassed Zuckerberg then closed his all-hands meeting with:

$3,500! I said that is the most expensive VR headset in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine. Now, it may sell very well or not, I, you know, we have our strategy, we’ve got great VR headsets in the market today, we, you can get a Quest 2 now for $299.99; it’s a very capable machine, it’ll do music, it’ll do, uh, internet, it’ll do email, it’ll do instant messaging. So, I, I kinda look at that and I say, well, I like our strategy. I like it a lot.

Right now we’re selling hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of VR headsets a year, Apple is selling zero VR headsets a year (half smile). In six months, they’ll have the most expensive VR headset by far ever in the marketplace (laughs) and let’s see (shrugs), you know, eh, what’s the expression, let’s see how the competition goes.

Oh, we’ll see alright.

All of this is coming from a guy who was smart enough to steal the idea for Facebook, but doesn’t seem to be smart enough to run Facebook profitably without trampling his users’ privacy without permission. Hence, his quixotic push to sell a warmed-over Second Life knockoff; stench of desperation be damned.

Of course the Apple Vision Pro is “not the one he wants.” It’s going to kill him.

This is not a VR headset. It’s a spatial computer. Previous failures in the “VR headset” game from the likes of Meta are due to the fact that nobody else can come close to matching Apple’s ability to produce the entire widget. Only Apple has the custom silicon required, the custom operating system, the ecosystem and the interoperability it provides; no other company on earth can do what Apple has done here.

And even Mark Zuckerberg, who’ll soon be buying a middling NBA team for five times its value, can figure that out.

See also: Zuckerberg panics, Osborne Effects Meta with rushed ‘Quest 3’ headset reveal – June 1, 2023

https://macdailynews.com/2023/06/08/metas-zuckerberg-dismisses-apple-vision-pro-not-the-one-that-i-want/