(Credit: Will Greenwald/PCMag)
Meta has reportedly killed plans to make a competitor to Apple's Vision Pro.
The company was eyeing a 2027 launch for a high-end alternative to its affordable Quest VR headsets. But costs and lackluster Vision Pro sales prompted Meta to rethink those plans, according to The Information.
Meta's mixed-reality headset, codenamed La Jolla, was expected to use micro OLED displays. That would bring the Quest headsets more in line with the Vision Pro, which features a micro-OLED projection system with 90, 96, and 100Hz refresh rates.
In PCMag's testing, the Vision Pro display was "bright, colorful, and sharp, far exceeding the clarity of the second-highest-resolution headset we’ve tested, the 6-million-pixel-per-eye HTC Vive Pro 2." But as Omdia noted earlier this year, the display is the most expensive part of the $3,499 Vision Pro: one Micro OLED display for the headset runs a whopping $228, and each Vision Pro needs two, one for each eye.
Meta reportedly wanted to keep its Vision Pro competitor under $1,000, but the current cost of OLED panels made that goal unrealistic, at least for the time being.
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth addressed the rumors in a post on Threads. "Just your regularly scheduled public service announcement: we have many prototypes in development at all times. But we don't bring all of them to production. We move forward with some, we pass on others. Decisions like this happen all the time, and stories based on chatter about one individual decision will never give the real picture."
Meanwhile, the Vision Pro hasn't exactly been killing it when it comes to sales. It's not projected to sell more than 500,000 units this year, IDC told Bloomberg in July, and the headset is expected to see a 75% drop in US sales this quarter.
Ironically, Apple reportedly ditched plans for a second-gen Vision Pro to focus on a lower-cost version to compete with the Quest headsets.
Expect to hear more about Meta's VR plans at its Connect event on Sept. 25-26, which may include the launch of AR glasses, The Verge reports.