Our unbiased take on Mark Zuckerberg’s biased Apple Vision Pro review
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.
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.
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.
Ars technica
