I guess the big question I have is... what's the point of an extremely expensive headset when it looks like Quest 3 at 7x less the price is going to deliver a roughly similar experience, quality-wise?
My gut feeling is Quest 3 will be more than good enough for most people/use cases, and people will be more than happy to pay 7x less for what is - at the end of the day - basically the same experience.
Vision Pro looks like a better version of HoloLens of yesteryear. Doesn’t really seem all that groundbreaking to me, just more refined.
The main difference is that Vision has a laptop grade processor (Apple M chip), LiDAR, and another separate processor to manage the LiDAR, a separate depth sensor, & all the other 12 sensors and cameras
The Quest only has a smartphone processor. The pro doesn’t even have a depth sensor. While the q3 will have a depth sensor, it will not have eye tracking or face tracking, in addition to only running yet another smartphone processor and only ~5 sensors and cameras
I seriously doubt it comes close to what Apple is doing. The price just isn’t anywhere near high enough.
Fact is there is a laptop chip stuffed into this headset, there is a mobile soc in the oculus line.
Although I do think that facebook has sold a lot of their devices at a loss?
Apple loves their profit margins. But it’s not $3500 for fun. It’s clearly expensive to make, even if their profit margin in still baked in.
This product is inherently experimental. They are not going to be operating at the type of scale they do when it comes to iphones, macbooks, ipads, etc ...
So I do imagine that if this thing takes off and they can start putting out hundreds of thousands or millions of units they will gain more savings through scale.
I'd love to know what their initial order for launch is. It will be interesting to see how far the preorder precedes delivery as well.
Full color passthrough from cameras and a depth sensor (better than Quest Pro), 120Hz, slightly higher resolution than Quest 2, 40% smaller (whatever that means), Snapdragon XR2 Gen2 (they claim more than twice as fast as Quest 2), pancake lenses, controllers without the tracking rings, $500.
Compared to Apple's, the main downsides are lower resolution display (also not OLED), slower, no eye tracking.
Main advantages are price, support for games/controllers (you can still use hand tracking if you just want to watch movies), and no external battery pack.