Mark Zuckerberg takes a pop at Apple pricing

Mark Zuckerberg has taken a direct shot at Apple for pricing its devices so highly.

The father of Facebook was talking on a podcast in the wake of the launch of the Meta Quest Pro, his company’s new £1,499 mixed reality headset.

On the matter of the high pricing of his new metaverse portal, Zuckerberg told analyst Ben Thompson (via Business Insider) that the Meta Quest Pro was actually being sold at “break-even point”.

Zuckerberg took the opportunity to contrast his company’s approach to pricing to that of Apple. “If you’re Apple, you build hardware and you charge as much as you can for it,” he said.

Suffice to say, the Facebook founder and perpetual Apple sniper feels that Meta’s strategy is the better one for making the metaverse an actual thing that people use rather than a highfalutin concept.

“That business strategy I think is aligned with the mission of basically connecting people and having people there because if you want to build a social experience, you have to have the people there,” he said.

This is far from the first time that Zuckerberg has spoken out about a fundamental difference in approach between Meta and Apple. After years of bitter wrangling in the press and the courts around the matters of open platforms and data privacy, the Facebook founder said in July that the two companies were now in “a very deep, philosophical competition about what direction the internet should go in”.

Given that Apple still hasn’t played its opening move in AR/VR, we’ll have to wait and see which metaverse approach is best.