When Apple’s Vision Pro hit shelves earlier this month, it joined a host of other mixed reality devices, most notably Meta’s Quest—the best-selling suite of VR headsets on the market. 

A competition has naturally emerged between the two tech giants, prompting Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to post a video on Instagram in which he compared Quest with Vision Pro (spoiler: he likes Quest).

But within the marketing world, where both of these devices are expected to play a significant role in the coming years, choosing the winner is far more complicated. Experts who spoke with Ad Age compared the two headsets across a number of metrics including brand friendliness, capabilities around entertainment and work, as well as intangible factors not reflected in the other criteria. 

Neither Apple nor Meta responded to requests for comment.

Of course, it’s somewhat unfair to compare the Meta Quest device, already in its third generation, to Vision Pro, a first-generation headset, said Rolf Illenberger, founder and CEO of software platform VRdirect. Meta Quest 3, the newest iteration, launched last October with a price of $500. Compared to Vision Pro, which costs $3,500, Quest has had far more time to develop an affordable pricing strategy.

But the price tag isn’t everything. In early demos of the Vision Pro, chief marketing officers have reacted quite positively to its potential for immersive brand experiences, said Luke Hurd, director of experience design at VML. 

The feeling is that, thanks to the product’s visual clarity and crispness, “consumers will believe [brand experiences]—they won’t feel like video game cut-scenes,” he said.

CMOs have not responded with as much enthusiasm for Meta’s Quest device, according to Hurd. Though impressed with its hardware improvements and gaming functionality, executives are concerned about how their brands would be visually represented on Quest, given its lesser-quality display and limitations around realism.

The level of brand friendliness of each device is one of the most important aspects for marketers, since this will determine the kinds of opportunities and when they will become available. Quest has the upper hand in this regard given the level of brand activity that already exists, said Greg Swan, chief creative and strategy officer for social media agency The Social Lights.

“Brands have built pilots and audience engagement programs in this architecture, including virtual brand experiences in Horizon Worlds, standalone apps and [experiences] at pop-up physical activations,” he said. These marketers have included Disney, Puma and Alo Yoga.

Quest’s monetization structure is also well fleshed-out, said Swan. Quest Store, where apps and games are available for download and purchase, has generated over $2 billion in revenue since 2019, Meta announced at last year’s Connect conference.

Comparatively, less brand activity on the Vision Pro has much to do with the short amount of time it’s been on the market. That said, Apple launched the device with over 600 apps specially built by developers for Vision Pro. These include big-name brands such as TikTok, streaming giants Disney and Paramount and brands such as e.l.f. Beauty and J.Crew. A few entertainment giants decided to sit out the launch, such as Netflix, whose co-CEO later said that the device is too “subscale” for any meaningful activation.

But with more time on the market, Hurd expects Vision Pro to offer brands a kind of immersive storytelling opportunity that Quest cannot, owing to the former’s high video fidelity and lesser emphasis on gaming.

Entertainment and work

Both Vision Pro and Meta Quest can be summarized as part-entertainment, part-productivity devices, given how they have been marketed by their providers, as well as the kinds of apps that are mostly available. 

On the entertainment front, Quest is the better device because of its emphasis on gaming, said Alex Baghdjian, co-founder and chief strategy officer of ad agency Funday. Baghdjian cited as evidence Quest’s integrations with Steam, the largest digital distribution platform for computer games, and Xbox, which offers popular titles like “Star Wars” and “Fallout.” Roblox is also available on the headset.

Vision Pro, on the other hand, “is probably going to have as many games as on a Mac, which is not a lot,” said VML’s Hurd.

But for more passive forms of entertainment, such as movie and TV watching, Hurd adamantly gives Vision Pro the advantage. Its 3D viewing experience and cinematic atmospheres, enabled through an immersive feature called Environments, outgun Quest’s lesser quality displays, he said. 

VRdirect’s Illenberger also sees screen quality as a reason that Vision Pro is the better entertainment play—“one that will get better in future iterations as well,” he said.

As for how the devices stack up for work-related tasks, marketers are split. Baghdjian likes Quest because it’s lighter weight—515 grams versus Vision Pro’s 600 to 650 grams (although Meta Quest Pro weighs over 700 grams). He also views the prohibitive pricing of Vision Pro as an impediment to collaboration, since many professionals are not willing or able to shell out $3,500 for another work device. The Social Lights’ Swan, too, views Quest as “far ahead” in terms of professional services.

However, Justin Fredericks, CEO of AR marketing platform Ar/t House, is drawn to Vision Pro’s “augmented productivity,” which allows a user to effectively “[pull] all the apps out of [their] phone, placing and resizing them [in] mid-air…to then experience [them] hands-free,” he said. 

This functionality is why Hurd, too, sees Vision Pro as the better work device, since it more closely resembles the experience of working on a desktop. Multiple app-tasking is not seamless on Quest, he said, exacerbated by the need to use external controllers. Vision Pro, on the other hand, utilizes eye-tracking technology for user input and selection.

Intangibles

As with any product and its potential for success, there are certain factors to consider that have more to do with its context than content. 

Brand affinity, for example, will undoubtedly play a role in how both Vision Pro and Meta Quest are received by consumers and marketers. Apple has the clear upper hand in this regard, said Funday’s Baghdjian, “[giving] it a much higher likelihood of winning, even with an inferior product.”

To glean this in effect in real-time, all one has to do is see the “lengthy lines out the door at Apple Stores to demo Vision Pro,” according to VRdirect’s Illenberger.

“They have gone viral in a number of different ways since the product shipped. Now imagine what’s going to happen once the developers they’ve targeted start to build apps around gaming, functionality, sports or apps we haven’t even thought of yet?” he said.

Not only does Meta typically fail to receive the level of enthusiasm and fandom showered upon Apple, but it sees even negative affinity thanks to its recurring scandals in the social media space. A study conducted in the U.K. last year by Forbes Advisor found that Meta is one of the least favored technology companies, with 48% of consumers considering it untrustworthy.

Another intangible advantage that Vision Pro has over Quest is that it plugs into the Apple ecosystem—the technological layer underpinning hundreds of millions of people’s daily lives. Vision Pro can integrate with the data on a user’s iPhone, iPad, Macbook, Apple Watch and whatever other Apple product they own, said VML’s Hurd.

Apple Pay, for example, allows for seamless shopping within the device, secured by an optic ID scan. With Quest, one is “constantly taking off the headset,” said Hurd, in order to pay from their mobile phone.

These intangibles could benefit Apple as it competes with Meta’s multi-year head-start in the headset market. But mainstream adoption could still be years away. Members of Apple’s Vision Pro team expect the device will need four generations to hit its stride in the public, according to Bloomberg.

“It’s a long game,” said Baghdjian.