Meta’s Recurring Apple Nightmare

You know the scene in the movie where the kids thought they’ve fought off the killer only for him to reappear? Methodically walking towards them with a weapon? Yeah, to Meta, that must feel like Apple.

It was a mere two years ago when Apple unleashed their virtual reality – sorry, "Spatial Computing" – headset into the market to take on and potentially take out market leader Meta. Of course, the Vision Pro completely and utterly failed to make a dent in that market. Part of it was poor strategy, but the bigger issue was timing. For roughly the 30th year in a row, the VR market failed to materialize.

In a backwards way, Apple did hurt the Meta Quest. Because the Vision Pro failed to validate the market, even Meta is now pulling back. Sure the Quest still controls that world, but it's a tiny one. And one that's shrinking again. Meta's entire bet-the-company strategy – from name on down – on the metaverse now looks misguided at best. And certainly it was a distraction as the company looks to be competitive in the real battle: AI.

Still, Meta will say that without the billions burned on metaverse hardware, they wouldn't have ended up with their Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses. In yet another hardware market littered with bodies – AI wearables – Meta seems to have found an actual hit. As such, guess who's now coming for them?

Yep, theyyyyy'rrrreee baaaaccckkk...