Meta is reportedly planning to release its Meta Quest 4 headset in 2026 and a competitor to the Vision Pro in 2027.
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That is according to a recent article by the business technology publication ‘The Information’.
It also asserts that the US technology corporation has a third headset in store, also due to come out in 2026, which is likely to be a more affordable variant of the Quest 4.
This would make sense seeing as Meta released its Quest 3 in October last year and is expected to bring out its ‘lite’ version in around the same time this year.
Cutting Back on Reality Labs Investment
Despite these grand plans for its VR and AR glasses arm of the business, largely housed within its ‘Reality Labs’ business research unit, The Information’s report also highlighted that Meta is working on reducing its Reality Labs expenditure by 20 percent as its revenue is currently nowhere near meeting its operating costs.
In fact, Reality Labs posted a loss of $3.8 billion for the first quarter of 2024, which has been a similar story for successive years.
Since 2019, it is estimated to have lost somewhere in the region of $55 billion.
Now, Bank of America analysts have estimated that the latest Reality Labs spending cut-backs will save Meta around $3 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, defended Reality Labs in the company’s quarterly earnings call in April: “One strategy dynamic that I’ve been reflecting on is that an increasing amount of our Reality Labs work is going towards serving our AI efforts.
“We currently report on our financials as if Family of Apps and Reality Labs were two completely separate businesses, but strategically I think of them as fundamentally the same business with the vision of Reality Labs to build the next generation of computing platforms in large part so that way we can build the best apps and experiences on top of them.
Zuckerberg continued:
“To be clear, I think that our first-party Quest devices will continue to be the most popular headsets as we see today, and we’ll continue focusing on advancing the state-of-the-art tech and making it accessible to everyone.
“But I also think that opening our ecosystem and opening our operating system will help grow the ecosystem even faster.”
Meta was still over 40 percent up for the at the time Zuckerberg was speaking, and its share price hit an all time high of $527.34 on April 5th.
Price speculation has already begun and with Apple’s Vision Pro headset being listed for a whopping $3,500, it is anyone’s guess as to the price tag Meta assigns to its new headsets.
The precise features that will be present on all three of Meta’s headsets are largely unknown, but The Information’s report does mention that next year’s glasses will only have a display in the right. This would seem to suggest that the device could be advanced smart glasses as opposed to AR smart glasses.
