If You’re Planning to Buy Meta Quest 2, You’d Better Do It Quickly.
If you’ve been hesitant about buying the Meta Quest 2 VR system, it’s time to make a decision: Yesterday, Meta announced that the price of Quest 2 will increase by $100 starting August 1st. This means you only have five days. pull out a credit card or face having to give Mark Zuckerberg a hundred extra dollars to toss into an incinerator to build the future of the metaverse .
The 128GB Quest 2 will go up from $299 to $399, while the 256GB model will jump from $399 to $499. The company justified the increase, saying it was necessary “in order to continue to invest in the development of the virtual reality industry in the long term.”
A price hike of more than 30% on a two-year-old tech product is surprising at first, but when viewed in the context of Meta’s recent troubles and soon-to-be-released next-gen VR hardware, it makes (little) more sense. Meta/Facebook has recently gone through a rough patch – the company’s stock has dropped by half its previous value since 2021, and it’s likely lost many billions due to Apple’s single policy change – so it looks like the company has decided the days of subsidizing the VR industry , producing shockingly affordable headsets, has come to an end.
All About “Project Cambria”, Meta’s Next Virtual Reality System
While Meta hasn’t announced a price, release date, or full details on its next VR system (codenamed “Project Cambria”), it’s been steadily dumping information over the past few months.
During an investor call on April 27, Mark Zuckerberg said that the next generation VR headset is coming soon and the company has serious ambitions. “Later this year, we will be releasing a higher-end headset codenamed Project Cambria that will focus more on work use cases and eventually replace your laptop or work rig,” Zuckerberg said. “This premium device will feature improved ergonomics and full-color mixed reality transmission to seamlessly blend virtual reality with the physical world.” Careful.
The official meta account posted a video back in May showing off the cool new headset , and Mark Zuckerberg also shared a clip on Facebook of him rocking the (heavily censored) Project Cambria headset.
It all looks and sounds expensive, though vaguely similar to a minor episode of Black Mirror . Online sources suggest that “Project Cambria” will be released in September for “over $799”. If that’s the case, then raising the price of the Quest 2 might make sense from a consumer psychology standpoint: spending $800 on a new thing when I can get an old, nearly as good thing for only $300 seems wild to me. But switching to an $800 device when the old one would already cost me $400 seems to make more sense. Relatively.
It remains to be seen whether anyone actually wants to replace their laptop with a working virtual reality – I think this technology is better suited for chopping people’s heads with swords and watching pornography . But either way, it’s a win-win for consumers. We’d all like a VR device that lives up to the promises of the technology, but if it doesn’t work for the Meta, we’ll at least enjoy watching Mark Zuckerberg fail.