unveiled its augmented reality headset
Vision Pro
at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 2023). The augmented reality headset called
Apple Vision Pro
that “seamlessly” blends the real and digital world. As for design they look like a pair of ski goggles. “It’s the first Apple product you look through, and not at,” CEO
Tim Cook
said of the device.
Meta
CEO
Mark Zuckerberg
, whose company make rival Quest range headsets, doesn’t seem too pleased by Apple Vision Pro. In a companywide meeting with Meta employees,
Zuckerberg
said that Apple’s device didn’t present any major breakthroughs in technology that Meta hadn’t “already explored” and that its vision for how people will use the device is “not the one that I want.” He also sent a letter to employees on Apple Vision Pro. Here’s the letter as it appears in The Verge.
Apple finally announced their headset, so I want to talk about that for a second. I was really curious to see what they were gonna ship. And obviously I haven’t seen it yet, so I’ll learn more as we get to play with it and see what happens and how people use it.
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 of physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of. They went with a higher resolution display, and between that and all the technology they put in there to power it, it costs seven times more and now requires so much energy that now you need a battery and a wire attached to it to use it. They made that design trade-off and it might make sense for the cases that they’re going for.
But look, I think that their announcement really showcases 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 that our products are as accessible and affordable to everyone as possible, and that is a core part of what we do. And we have sold tens of millions of Quests.
More importantly, our vision for the metaverse and presence is fundamentally social. It’s about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer in new ways. Our device is also about being active and doing things. 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. There’s a real philosophical difference in terms of how we’re approaching this. 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. But it’s going to be a fun journey.
