Since the launch of the Apple Vision Pro, it’s not been hard to find countless thoughts and impressions on the headset from professional reviewers and random purchasers. But among all those hot takes, the opinions of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stand out for a few reasons—not least of which is that he and his company have spent years of development time and lost tens of billions of dollars creating the competing Quest headset line.
For that reason alone, Zuckerberg’s Instagram-posted thoughts on the Vision Pro can’t be considered an impartial take on the device’s pros and cons. Still, Zuckerberg’s short review included its fair share of fair points, alongside some careful turns of phrase that obscure the Quest’s relative deficiencies.
View this post on Instagram
To figure out which is which, we thought we’d go through Zuckerberg’s review and give a quick review of the points he makes. In doing so, we get a good viewpoint on the very different angles with which Meta and Apple are approaching mixed-reality headset design.
There’s “high-quality” and then there’s “high-quality”
Near the start of his analysis, Zuckerberg says that the “Quest 3 does high-quality passthrough with big screens, just like Vision Pro.” This is only true in the most technical sense. Saying both headsets have “high-quality passthrough” is like saying an old 720p LCD TV and a new 4K OLED both have “high-quality screens.”
Compared side by side, Apple’s array of cameras and higher-resolution displays combine for a much sharper and more dynamic view of the “real world” than the Quest 3, which barely limps over the “good enough” passthrough threshold, in my experience. That display quality extends to the “big screens” Zuckerberg mentions, too, which are noticeably clearer and easier to read on the Vision Pro.
Speaking of those “big screens,” the experience with 2D virtual displays is quite different in both headsets. The Vision Pro seems built from the ground up with the ability to place and resize thousands of flat iOS apps anywhere around your virtual space. Those virtual windows react to the light in the room, cast gentle shadows in your virtual view, and get occluded by objects in the real world, adding to the sense that they are really “there” with you.
The Quest, on the other hand, was built more with immersive VR experiences in mind. Yes, recent Quest OS upgrades added the ability to snap selected flat apps and system tools (e.g., the store) into place in your Quest “home environment.” But the system-level “huge floating screens” experience is still much more limited than that on the Vision Pro, which offers easy free positioning and resizing of all sorts of apps. Quest users looking for something similar need to rely on a third-party tool like Virtual Desktop, which also has its own quirks and limitations.
Every gram matters
Zuckerberg then argues that “Quest, I think, is just a lot more comfortable. We designed it to weigh 120 grams less, which makes a really big difference on your face.” This is one of Zuckerberg’s best arguments. A difference of just 120 grams might not sound like much, but it’s a significant percentage of the 600 to 650 grams Apple cites in public tech specs (a weight which doesn’t include a heavy battery pack sitting off to the side).
As VR aficionados know, every single gram matters when it comes to a device that’s being strapped to the front of your face. Former Meta CTO John Carmack knew this well when he pushed the company to develop a $250, 250 g headset designed to bring “super light comforts” to “more people at low-end price points.” Carmack added that Meta was “not building that headset… but I keep trying.” Then he left the company just a few months later, apparently giving up on his personal effort.
Carmack’s push for a much lighter headset highlights how much more work both Meta and Apple still have to do when it comes to weight and comfort. Getting a headset that’s as light as possible should be a major focus for both companies going forward, especially if they envision a critical mass of people living and working in mixed reality for a large portion of their days.
Seeing and touching
Zuckerberg’s next major point of comparison is that “our field of view is wider,” which seems accurate. The Quest 3’s 110-degree horizontal field of view leads to a bit less of that tunnel-vision, ski-goggle effect than you get with the Vision Pro’s estimated 100-degree horizontal field of view. This is another area of headset design where every little bit of improvement matters. You don’t really realize how much you miss your peripheral vision until you’re in a headset that necessarily cuts it off.
In this regard, Meta’s overengineered, overly expensive Quest Pro deserves some credit for featuring easily removable light blockers that let you see the real world (if not the virtual world) out of the corners of your eyes while in mixed reality. Unfortunately, neither the Quest 3 nor the Vision Pro are designed to be used without the “facial interface” that blocks off this peripheral vision. It’s a design decision that deserves a second look if future mixed-reality headsets are going to go mainstream.
After mentioning “precision controllers that are great for games” on the Quest 3, Zuckerberg mentions that “both headsets support hand tracking, but I found ours to be a little more accurate.” This statement kind of shocked me. In my Quest 3 review, I noted that the “speed and fidelity of the hand- and finger-tracking system is just shaky enough to make simple tasks completely annoying.” In my short time with the Vision Pro, on the other hand, I found I never really had to worry whether or not it would detect an app-grabbing pinch of my fingers.
Then again, this isn’t quite a fair comparison. In most Quest apps that use hand-tracking, you’re holding your entire hand in front of you to manipulate some in-app object directly. That’s a much harder ask than the Vision Pro’s pinch-tracking, which generally keeps track of a stationary hand sitting on a table or lap.
To replace complicated hand-tracking, the Vision Pro uses eye-tracking as its “pointer” system, a system that even Zuckerberg admits “is really nice” on the Apple headset. He goes on to mention that “we actually had those [eye-tracking] sensors back in Quest Pro,” without mentioning that the headset did not use that eye-tracking as a system-level control interface in any real way.
Zuckerberg also said that “we’re going to bring [eye-tracking sensors] back in the future.” That makes us wonder if Meta has plans to mimic Apple’s eye-control interface in the future (and wonder how much eye-tracking tech contributed to the high price of both the Quest Pro and Vision Pro).
A visit to the library
Zuckerberg starts to wrap up his comparative review with perhaps his strongest point: “Quest’s immersive content library is a lot deeper [than Vision Pro]. We’ve been working with studios building virtual and mixed-reality games and content for a long time now. If you want to watch YouTube or play Xbox on a big screen anywhere you go, that’s only available on Quest right now.”
Indeed, Quest’s yearslong head start in the headset arena has made the Quest library much more robust than the handful of dedicated VisionOS apps available at launch on the Vision Pro. Apple’s cross-compatibility with iOS apps and the Safari web browser helps fill in the gap a little bit, but when it comes to experiences really designed with virtual or mixed reality in mind, Quest definitely has the advantage.
But let’s also make note of Zuckerberg’s “right now.” Apple has a great relationship with a deep bench of iOS developers, many of whom now have Vision Pro headsets in their hands. It’s easy to imagine those developers making the lineup of VisionOS apps much deeper in the near future. Given Apple’s design focus, the Vision Pro lineup will also likely be much less game-heavy than the current Meta Quest store.
Zuckerberg then wraps up his comparison by comparing the “open” model of the Quest to the “closed” model of the Vision Pro. It’s a fair comparison since tools like SideQuest make it relatively easy to sideload content onto a Quest headset, including some content that likely wouldn’t pass Meta’s official store content restrictions.
I wonder how much that advantage will matter to a critical mass of the mixed-reality headset market, though. As Zuckerberg notes, the closed model of the iPhone “won” in the mobile marketplace. Outside of a small niche, It’s hard to see sideloading as the killer app that convinces many people to go with Quest over Vision Pro.
Two different markets
Throughout his video, Zuckerberg tries to argue that the Quest isn’t just a better value than the seven-times-as-expensive Vision Pro, but that it’s “the better product, period… When I look around, it seems like there are a lot of people who just assumed that Vision Pro would be higher quality because it’s Apple and it costs $3,000 more. But, honestly, I’m pretty surprised that Quest is better for the vast majority of things that people use these headsets for with that price differential.”
Cost aside, calling the Quest 3 the better overall headset experience overall is a tough case to make. The Vision Pro has some obvious advantages over the Quest 3 regarding display fidelity, passthrough cameras, and OS/user experience that can’t just be waved away. But despite its much lower cost, the Quest 3 also still has some key advantages in terms of weight/comfort, a well-established software library, and the hand-tracking controller support that much of VR gaming has been built on.
More importantly, though, Zuckerberg notes that “the different companies made different design decisions for their headsets,” a fact that reflects the very different markets for each device. The Quest has for years been focused on closed-off virtual reality and gaming experiences, only pivoting somewhat awkwardly to “mixed reality” relatively recently. Vision Pro, on the other hand, seems built from the ground up with mixed reality in mind, with more of a focus on “flat” experiences projected over the real world.
In a sense, these two headset makers are talking past each other a bit. Just like the Nintendo Switch and Sony PS5 aim for different portions of the video game market, Meta and Apple’s headsets are designed for very different portions of the mixed reality market. Saying which is “the better product” depends almost entirely on which vision of mixed reality you have in mind.