Goodbye Meta Quest Pro, we won't miss you
Meta Quest Pro is discontinued and taken off the market after just over two years. Its legacy will be that it was a stepping stone to something much bigger.
Meta announced last September that the headset was being discontinued and would only be available while supplies last, or until the end of the year.
The latter is now the case: Meta's product page now states that the Meta Quest Pro is no longer available. Instead, Meta refers to the newer, faster and cheaper Meta Quest 3.
With the Meta Quest 2 sold out and the Meta Quest Pro no longer available, Meta now only sells the Quest 3 family of devices.
The Quest Pro's Touch Pro controllers, which Meta reduced in price in the autumn, are still sold as a separate product. They also support Quest 3 and 2, but not Quest 3S.
The failure of the Meta Quest Pro
Meta Quest Pro was released in October 2022 for $1,500.
The product introduced several innovations that no Meta headset had offered to date: eye and face tracking, the pancake lenses that were later used in Meta Quest 3, LC displays with MiniLED backlighting and local dimming for better contrast, and ringless controllers that can track themselves using built-in cameras.
The mixed reality device's drawbacks included an outdated chipset, lack of proprietary software, poor passthrough quality, limited mixed reality capabilities, and an unjustifiably high price.
The device was poorly received and flopped. Meta dropped the price to $1,000 a few months after the launch. Later, some of the headsets were even given away to developers.
My initial assessment of Quest Pro was brutal, but looking back, I think my judgments have aged well.
Don't expect Quest Pro 2 anytime soon.
The future of the product line is currently unclear. A successor planned for 2027 was scrapped last year and replaced by another project that might appeal to more people. Meta Quest Pro 2 may come to market one day, but it doesn't look like it will happen in the next three years.
Meta has probably realized that the time for expensive headsets has not yet come. The Meta Quest Pro and Apple Vision Pro have shown this, and the same fate will likely befall Samsung's upcoming mixed reality headset if it costs over $1,000, which it most likely will.
But the effort has not been in vain. Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth said in an interview a few months ago that Quest Pro paved the way for Quest 3 and that the fruits of that labor will be seen in upcoming devices. "Quest Pro was the device that allowed us to pioneer pancake lenses and eye and face tracking, which we will return to in the future."
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