Meta's CTO drags the Apple Vision Pro for being 'very uncomfortable'

• Andrew Bosworth is the latest executive to rag on Apple's Vision Pro, a rival to Meta's Quest.
• The Meta CTO criticized the weight of the Apple headset, as well as its motion blur.

Mark Zuckerberg may have been the first Meta exec to throw a jab at the Vision Pro, but his chief technology officer quickly made it a one-two punch.

Andrew Bosworth, Meta's CTO, said in a recent Q&A on his Instagram that several issues stood out to him after he tried Apple's new headset. The Vision Pro's main competitor is Meta's own Quest series of VR headsets.

In the seven-part response posted Wednesday, Bosworth said he had anticipated having to position Meta's Quest 3 as "the best value headset" on the market — or in other words, that the Apple Vision Pro would be the superior device from a purely technological standpoint. The first generation of Vision Pros are selling for $3,500, which dwarfs the Quest 3's $500 price tag.

But after using it, Bosworth said that's not the case, and he agrees with his boss that Meta's Quest 3 is the better headset overall.

"As soon as I put the headset on, I can see what trade-offs they made and why they made them. And, perhaps definitionally, those aren't the trade-offs I would have made," he said.

Bosworth, like many other reviewers, was critical of the Vision Pro's hefty weight, saying that before long he'd found it "very uncomfortable to use."

"I think it's way too much weight. And it's distributed poorly," he said.

While Apple executives have argued that the device is as light as it can possibly be, Bosworth said the company's aesthetic choices are part of the problem.

"It's part of their design language, the metal and the glass," he said. "But metal and glass are not premium materials when they're on your face. When they're in your hand, they feel nice and they react nicely. But on your face, lightness is the premium material."

He also described the motion blur in the device screen when looking at your physical surroundings as "really distracting."

"I look around a lot, I guess," he said. "I don't know, maybe that's the problem."

Bosworth did say that there were some "tremendously great things" that he enjoyed in the Vision Pro, namely the screens' super-high-resolution and low latency, which he said made watching movies and media an impressive experience.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Meta CEO wants you to opt for its Quest 3 headset over Apple's. "Save yourself $3,000," he said.

"Am I being totally fair? I don't know," he added. "I'm not here to be fair. I am being honest with you."

Bosworth's analysis of the Vision Pro echoed Zuckerberg's earlier critique.

"I don't just think that Quest is the better value, it's the better product period," Zuckerberg said about the Vision Pro in a video posted to his Instagram page on Tuesday.

The Meta CEO also drew attention to the Vision Pro's unwieldy weight — noting that the Quest 3 is 120 grams less, "a really big difference on your face" — its motion blur, and its relative lack of third-party content.

"They have different strengths, but overall Quest is better for the vast majority of things that people use mixed reality for," Zuckerberg said.