Apple’s Vision Pro & Meta’s Vision Oh No

Some initial thoughts on Apple’s position versus Meta’s…

There’s a scene in the 1995 film Heat — incidentally, my favorite movie — that popped into my head today while watching Apple’s WWDC keynote. (No, not that scene.) Actually, it’s not even really a scene, more a moment:

Sgt. Drucker: You recognize the M.O.?
Vincent Hanna: M.O.? Is that they're good…

After years — literally, years — of handwringing about their next product and whether or not it would be any good, Apple did what Apple does. They knocked the presentation of the device, the Vision Pro, out of the Apple Park. Now we can, and will, debate as to whether the device itself will be good. Let alone great. Let alone insanely great. Turns out, there’s still a lot of time for that conversation, with the product not shipping until next year.

But without question, Apple knew exactly what they were doing in presenting their Vision Pro to the world today. They followed their playbook. Their modus operandi. And yes, they’re good.

You couldn’t help but feel for Meta (the artist formerly known as Facebook) while watching this unveiling. Again, we’ll see soon enough what the reality of this reality is, but in terms of framing, presentation, and sheer “wow” factor, Apple blew Meta out of the water today.

And Meta, of course, knew Apple was likely to do that. Which is why they had to get the news of the Quest 3 headset out the door last week.¹ Releasing that information now, post this keynote, would have been one part comical and two parts embarrassing. And hey, look, I know no one likes Meta these days because they unleashed Facebook on the world. But again, you have to sort of feel badly here because they’ve been basically the sole company keeping this general space alive over the past several years of VR winter. And yet, after billions of dollars spent and several iterations on their products, today revealed a harsh truth: Meta is not Apple.

They lack the depth in terms of production, design, manufacturing, marketing, and soon, sales channels. To be fair, no one is Apple with regard to those things. But Meta is also not a nobody. They’re a $700B company. For a time, Meta must have thought they were going to own this space. XR Manifest Destiny. Meta’s Verse. After today, they can no longer assume that. It may now even be folly to simply think it.

To be clear, Meta can and should aim lower, quite literally. At $3,499, Apple is leaving a lot of room below the Vision Pro for the taking.² The Quest 3, at $499 — note the all important “at” there, that’s not the Quest 3,499 — is still sitting quite pretty at an attractive price point in a market Apple just validated. Meta is lucky that they did not unveil the Quest Pro at $1,499 last week, that would have been slaughtered along with their stock price. Thankfully, Meta learned that lesson on their own and corrected it ahead of Apple’s unveil. Phew.

Meta can and should play in the lower end of the market here. No one likes to hear that, let alone be in that position, but it’s the only real option. They need to triple-down on the gaming market and stay in the sub-$500 range. Apple’s headsets will come down in price over time, but again, $3,499 is a loooong way from $499. Given that entry point, I’d be surprised if Apple gets below $1,000 this decade.³ If ever. So Meta should have it to themselves.

Again, it’s not something they’ll want to hear. Or a corner they’ll want to be backed into. Mark Zuckerberg has made it clear that he believes the Metaverse is the future, and that Meta is going to drive it by owning the entire stack, as it were, just like Apple has done in mobile. But that door is now shut for Meta. And they need to recognize it immediately. They can perhaps run a game plan more akin to Android here. But they’re not going to be driving the state of the art of this market anymore.

If they’re being honest with themselves, they should see plenty of silver-linings to this. But it’s a hard self-assessment to make. Especially when you’ve literally bet the company on this space. You can still be a player, and an important one in an important part of the market. A larger scale market which Meta already touches thanks to their social products, no less. Maybe start there and inch up market over time as costs come down. But at the same time, there’s now a huge risk that Apple will frame the entire space and that it will flow downwards from there. And they, of course, did not mention “Metaverse” once today. Nor will they. Probably ever.

If anything, what Meta (and many others) call the “Metaverse”, Apple would probably call a sliver of “Spatial Computing” (a term which obviously plays nicely with “Spatial Audio”). The Vision Pro is a “device you look through, not at” which blends the real world and the digital world. Apple is good at this stuff, as it turns out. And while the price point may not be for everyone, the framing will likely be. Meta must be ready for that.

I’ve been impressed the past few years by the presentations of another player in the nascent space: Snap. Their keynotes struck me as looking through a decidedly human lens, as it were. Whereas Meta’s were more through a technology lens.⁴ Apple, quite naturally, married the two, as they so often do. The intersection of technology & liberal arts, and all that.⁵

The space is still too early and necessarily technical for anyone to be comfortable — perhaps literally — without a barrage of high-level walkthroughs of technical breakthroughs. And again, that’s one of Apple’s key strengths here (5,000+ patents!). But they did the job today to both explain to us what the Vision Pro is and to get everyone talking about it. Even if we’re not quite sure what it will be used for just yet — just like the Apple Watch, before it. That wasn’t the goal today.⁶ It was simply to showcase. You know, their M.O.

¹ Going so far as to give the first hands-on experience to Apple scoop maestro Mark Gurman.

² Cut to Steve Ballmer — hopefully not Mark Zuckerberg right now — laughing: “$3,500?! That is the most expensive headset in the world! That doesn’t have controllers?” BTW, I still like my vision of Steve Ballmer coming out on stage wearing a Vision Pro doing the “developers, developers, developers, developers” bit.

³ Though it’s worth considering the ‘Pro’ part of the ‘Vision Pro’ moniker. Even before the launch, Apple was said to be working on a smaller or cheaper or smaller and cheaper version of the device. Might such a device be the ‘Apple Vision’ minus the ‘Pro’? Even then, it might be hard to see a leap down from $3,499 to sub $1,000. But perhaps $1,499 with the aim to eventually get last year’s model down to $999?

⁴ Incidentally, whereas I noted that Meta was smart to bring Microsoft to their side in the impending battle with Apple — Microsoft was also mentioned as an Apple partner in their own don’t-call-it-metaverse today.

⁵ As an aside, I sort of wish they would have called back to Steve Jobs on stage sitting in his leather chair using the first iPad. There’s a risk given how the device looks to use, but you have to own that sooner or later. It could have been a nice moment for Tim Cook and an homage to his mentor. Then again, that presumes the outward facing elements of the device are ready for prime time, which I suspect they may not be fully yet.

⁶ I’ll have some broader thoughts on this WWDC, I just need to watch the keynote say, five or six more times. My god, it’s full of stars.