They're a dying breed because we don't share that. Like everybody watches their own things now. So that shared culture is dying down to Barbie movie, which is great. The Barbie movie is wonderful, but like fewer places.

You're saying people don't run around quoting Oppenheimer to each other all day? Yeah, why not? What's up with that? I am become deaf. I'm just going to start sending that to the Verge staff every day. I love it. Alex, tell me about the Quest 3. Tell Neelai about the Quest 3. We've been wondering about this thing. We kind of knew what it was. Neelai,

it's cool.'s

going on it's

it

looks bananas like i was looking at the photo of addy wearing this thing and i was like i don't know i

love it like we were talking about this in in slack the other day and people were like i hate it it looks alien and i'm like that's exactly why i love it because it looks kind of alien it's got it's got these three like little ovals on the front and they look kind of like the iphone 10 camera module so it looks like they slapped three of those on there which feels very like old-fashioned and kind of oh i've seen that before but then somehow

this is in the service of room tracking of pass-through it's

five hundred dollars it's got dual 2064 by 2208 pixels. So it's a much higher resolution than the previous one, which was only 1832 by 1920. It's going to be a little sharper. And it's got the second generation of the Snapdragon XR2 processor in it. And that's where a lot of the big stuff changes. So I think probably the most notable thing and the thing that Addy talked about in her hands-on was that the graphics are better on this thing. Like, things are sharper. The resolution's a little higher. Sean was very excited.

No one else has this frame of reference because zero people bought a Quest Pro. But I have one. Is it better than the Quest Pro or worse than the Quest Pro? Because Quest Pro is pretty good. Probably about better. The software is the best, but the hardware is great.

Yeah, from a pure display quality perspective, it's better than the Quest Pro. Really? Yeah. It's actually the highest res thing they've made, including the Quest Pro. The ongoing existence of the Quest Pro does not make any sense. So what we

should note here is that Alex Heath interviewed Zuckerberg on our site in the Decoder feed. And I think he asked for the Quest Pro and Zuckerberg was like, yeah, yeah. We just had a bunch

around. We had to ship them. But no, it's very clear that this is the one that Meta would like to sell you. I mean, Zuckerberg kept saying, and even Andrew Bosworth, cto afterwards kept saying this is the first mainstream mixed reality headset like that is their phrase right and they're coming after apple's vision pro in a really big way they made a bunch of jokes about how it doesn't have a cable or a battery pack yeah um which is honestly like a really good burn of the vision pro yeah it's also not 3500 so that's good but that is that is the pitch that they are making. They're like, this is the one. It's not finished. This is not where we're ultimately headed. Ultimately, where we're headed, I think they think is is these smart glasses, which we should also talk about. But this is the one that is for regular humans now. Yeah.

It's the end of this form factor, right? Or like the best version of this form factor you can get right now.

Yeah, exactly. And I think they continue to struggle to make the case for why people would want this. Like a lot of what they talked about was video games. They have more games, they have better games, there's stuff to do, but then they occasionally just throw in, you know, meta quest for business, but don't really explain that. They're just like, you can have it if you want it for business that's that's all we know about that they talk a little bit about it as an entertainment device which i think is interesting like they they show the same screenshot that everybody shows which is just like you can watch instead of watching one nba game you can watch seven nba games on virtual screens yeah and that is like extremely my shit but like i didn't get the sense that there is some sort of brand new life-changing use case for this it just seems like between pass-through better screens and just sort of an overall better experience of using that's

great though i just want to be like going from the iphone 3gs the iphone 4 and getting a reddit retina display is like great oh absolutely absolutely

and and i've of us got a demo of this. Mine was relatively short, but I still got to play a couple of the games and stuff. It is, I mean, leaps and bounds better than the Quest 2. Like the pass-through is not perfect. It's a little sort of warpy. Like the floor was moving a little bit.

But it's better than the Pro. Oh,

better than the Pro, way better than the quest 2 which is like black and white and essentially doesn't actually work as pass through not as good as the demo i got at the vision of the vision pro but that was super controlled who knows what that'll be like in real life uh but yeah this is a massive improvement over the quest 2 whether it will make people who didn't care about headsets care about headsets to me is still the open question right like that's what I don't know. But if you're a person who cares about headsets, gigantic upgrade. I

kind of think it didn't sell itself well enough. Like, like talking to Addy, talking to you, talking to people who got to actually try the thing was much more compelling to me than watching the actual keynote about the product.

I think this is going to be true for every VR headset, including the Vision Pro forever. Yeah. And

well, that's just very interesting to me because Addy told me about it and she's like, oh yeah, the Passer is way, way, way better. And I was like, oh dang, I kind of want it just for that. That sounds really cool. And then I don't see any of that on stage. And I'm like, well, I'm glad Addy told me. It

really is. One of the great unsolved problems of VR is how to show someone what you're seeing in VR in a way that looks at all compelling. Because your options are either like show it on the two screens, ones for each eye, which just doesn't make any sense to anybody. Or you just show it like a like slightly low res television. It's like this doesn't mean anything to anybody. And I've been hearing this from people in this space for like damn near a decade now that they're like, when we put this on someone's head, they get it. And until you put it on someone's head, it is so hard to explain what it is about it that works. The

only things I've ever seen, you know, there's people who play Beat Saber and they fill entire green screen rooms. And so like they're doing real-life overlays. Everyone's just got to do that. That's my feeling. But the problem is so many things are sitting and using a computer. Like Quest for Business is like, now you'll use Excel. And it's like, this sucks. Yes. Yeah, very large Excel. And the price doesn't... I

think the big problem is the price doesn't help. One of the reasons the Quest 2 was so compelling was you were like, wow, I can get this for $300 when it was first announced, right? And they've now dropped that price back down to $300 after like a brief time of increasing the price. And so a little wave there. And that was really compelling. Like I went out and bought it the day it was announced because I was like, that price is so low. I didn't get the $300 when I spent more money. But I was still like, wow, I'm getting such a deal. This is great. And then this one is still $500. That's the same price as a PS5 or an Xbox.

Yeah. This is very hard to justify as an impulse purchase at Christmas the way that I think a lot of Quest 2s got sold. It's sort of like, what tech present am I buying the kids for Christmas because it was like that lower number and

I think that's gonna harm adoption because because of that fact that you have to put it on you have to try it or you have to know somebody who has to really be compelled by it or

it actually I think what makes it even harder is it's like not a console generation right it's not ps4 to ps5 a lot of people have quest 2s because of what happened last christmas and the christmas before it yeah and it's like oh that's just sitting on the shelf although

i don't know i think this one is going to be a little bit tough because i think the the quest 3 is going to make the quest 4 a console generation because what it's going to do like everybody's going to spend the next year building actually usable mixed reality stuff because for the first time it's worth doing like the pass-through stuff is good enough and the vision pro is right and so we're now going to get to a point where there is an actual generation of stuff to do that takes advantage of this tech whereas right now it's like a lot of the reason for the mixed reality is, and they even pitch it this way so that like I can find my coffee cup or look at my phone without taking my headset off, which is useful. It's a bad reason to buy a product. And so there just hasn't, they need the thing and that will come and it can come now, which is really exciting. But I think it's going to make, it's going to make the selling point for next year's model much easier, but I don't know how much it does for right now.

Do you think it'll be next year's model, or do you think they'll wait a few years? That's the problem. I think they're still at console level, not at phone level, in encouraging upgrade cycles. And I think if they release a new one next year, it's just going to be like, well, at what point do I actually invest in this very expensive thing that isn't always reliably backwards compatible, that is like growing each year by these leaps and bounds? Shouldn't I just wait until next year? Shouldn't I just wait until next year? Shouldn't I just wait for another price drop? But I think they need to be a little more thoughtful about how they're marketing this thing and pricing it. But I still

also kind of want one. Yeah. Yeah, that's about right. And I think that's like the best case scenario for them.

Yeah, it's like Christmas, somebody gives me like a little Best Buy gift card. I'm like, somebody

wants to throw me 500 bucks. You know, maybe I'm buying a Quest 3. Spend it. Spend it, not on Legos. It

seems clear that what Meta did here was say, we have to stop building the best possible cheap thing and just build a thing that's really good and then charge what we have to. I think Apple went the same route to like the nth degree, but Meta has been on this path and like Snap has been doing this and others have been doing this where they're like, these things have to be cheap. They have to be impulse buys. You have to be able to buy them for Christmas and we're going to make them as good as we can and they'll get better and better over time and that hasn't really worked because it's still not possible to make a really good one for that price i don't have any reporting to back this up but i would bet good money that this hardware is not going to be earth shatteringly high margin for meta uh these things are expensive to build and hard to build and i think meta was smart to say like this is the bar for what quality is and we just have to charge what it costs to build this and let that get cheaper over time as opposed to like hoping quality goes up over time because that i just don't think has worked so far yeah

it looks cool though and this is by the way we should talk about the Heath interview with Zuck. Zuck makes this point, right? Like making things smaller and cheaper is actually very hard. And he, there's a, we can even watch the, we should go watch the whole thing. It's great. But we have a TikTok up where he's like, people are impressed by the pyramids, but it's actually small things. The beginning of his history channel show. One more thing I want to bring up out of the Heath interview. The Heath interview is great. Mark is super loose, super relaxed. Talks a lot about building products. Actually, he's relaxed about two things. It's building products. He's like back in builder mode and he's like, this is what's great. Like the last few years I've needed to be like this First Amendment scholar, statesman person. But like now I'm building shit again and he can tell how loose. and then he's super loose when he talks about beating people up so

loose loves

it just loves hitting a guy and that's like great it's like this is the most personality but he loves like mma as a sport not just like street fighting just be clear i'm very tired he's

just out there punching people on the street but

he like talks about it and he talks about how the skill and discipline and they're like you can see he's relaxed like he's back in his zone as opposed to senator we sell ads you know like um and there's a lot of talking about the quest three and building that and what they've learned and all this stuff there's a lot of talking about building threads and how excited that's made him and one more confirmation that they are definitely going to decentralize and federate threads, which I think is really cool.

Yeah. And he made the case you would hope he would make, which is that like, we think that the future of social, we have to give people confidence that these things are going to be around. And it's like, yes, Mark, where have you been for 20 years? Right. He's like, we've thought about doing a Facebook and Facebook is too complicated.

So you have to do it from

the beginning, which is like, cool, you know? And true. Like, I think that's like re-architecting Facebook for activity pub is probably not possible. It's just, yeah.

Can we talk about the coolest part of the meta connect?

Was it how ripped Mark Zuckerberg was? I said it like three times as we were sitting watching the live stream like i cannot believe how shredded this dude is yeah

like we i think we were all just quietly slacking each other just being like yo wow yeah

but it was

the glasses the glasses were something that i think hearing about them it was the opposite of the quest 3 somebody would tell me about the quest 3 and i'd be like oh that sounds really really cool but i'd watch the demo and i'd be like that's and then this one i'd watch the demo for the glasses and be like, eh. And then they talk about the glasses. I was like, actually, these, these sound cool. Like I want these glasses.

Convince me. I have been back and forth on this a million times. Smart glasses to me are either a thing that everyone should have immediately or an objectively stupid idea that just should not exist. And I genuinely go between them 10 times a day. Convince me they're cool.

Yeah, I do too. Cause I have to wear glasses and I don't want to go get new lenses for these $300 frames, which is probably the same price as most frames anyway. That price isn't that different. But they were good looking. And then the woman that did the presentation for him had such good energy. She was so excited to be there and talk about these glasses that I was like, are they really awesome? These seem awesome. And I think it was like the camera. It was just like the way the cameras work, the camera is much higher quality than it has been previously. I don't think I, I can't think of a practical use case for these glasses because they've got the audio in them. So you'll be able to hear stuff and you'll be able to use your phone to ask it. You can ask it questions and the responses will pop up on your phone. And that seems kind of cool and moving towards that mixed reality thing. And then it's got the cameras that will stream to threads and stream to Instagram and do all of that. And that seems really, really cool. And I don't think I actually want to be that connected to other people. But at the same time, part of me was like, but don't I?

So this is actually the exact tension that I have been feeling too. And Eli, I've been wondering all week about you because I remember when you first had a kid, one of the things that you did pretty quickly was buy a point and shoot camera because you're like, I want to take a lot of pictures. I want to document a lot of stuff, but I don't want to have my phone in front of my face all the time for lots of obvious reasons. And that is the exact use case that all of these companies make for smart glasses. Like there are kids in the demo reel for every single one of these. Right. Because you can have both hands. You can swing your kid around, whatever, but you are less, there's not so much of a thing between you and especially not a thing that is otherwise trying to grab your attention. Well, there's one thing between you and your kid.

You're wearing sunglasses. You

can get them in regular frame. You can get them with prescription lenses.

There's one thing. You can get transition lenses my dad wears transitions they're fine yeah your dad and like every fourth grader who just got their first pair of glasses i was that child that boy was me it was not cool my friends everyone someone please go to fourth grades across the country and tell these children wow this

is this is joey slander that i will not tolerate sorry

dad i had an adult person trying to help me to get transition glasses recently no

it's fine once you've like achieved in life yeah

it's okay you can have transition i see okay that's what that was that was the case made to be they're like no no you're you're you can do it now you're an adult yeah it's like your children are at the house. You're married.

You got a grandkid. You're like, yeah, just take a load off, bro. Just have sunglasses ready to go. When you're in fourth grade, it's not just tell the children.

They're just gray all the time. These little kids in gray lenses. It's

a weird 1980s in Wisconsin. Anyway, yes, this is the argument. The problem is the camera's not any good. But my RX100 is a great camera. That's why I bought it. My iPhone is an extremely complicated philosophical quandary of a camera. That's why I have it. This is like, I'll have it. I'll get my hands back, but I'm going to take shittier photos. Who doesn't love 12 megapixel single non-HDR photos?

People love it more than five megapixels, which was the previous one.

I haven't seen the photos, but that's always to me. It's like, you know, what's the phrase? The best camera is the one you have with you. I always have an amazing camera with me.

Your glasses.

Right. My glasses, my transition lenses. I know my phone's around, you know and i i bought a really nice camera so i could divest myself of the phone but i don't think having a more convenient camera you know i don't maybe i haven't seen the photos i haven't like used the thing again blind reacts to the the right hand glasses but you know i i don't know like it's

it's more technology when i was what david to your point i was after less yeah and i think i think to me like it's very clear that meta does not see these smart glasses as like the end point of smart glasses right like at the end of connect mark duckerberg got up and did the like almost sort of steve jobs impression of like you know when he was like it's a widescreen ipod it's a phone it's an internet communicator and he was like he showed it he was like we have the quest 3 headset we have all this ai communication stuff and then we have smart glasses and the case he made is that like the end state of this is that the first two things the quest and the ai stuff are going to end up in the glasses, right? Like he's like, this is the form factor, and we're going to put all this stuff into it over time. And I don't know how long that's going to take or if that's ever going to happen, but I believe them that that's the vision. And I think the question we've been asking for a bunch of years now is like, is there anything interesting along the way? And to me, just purely from a personal perspective, the cameras don't do anything for me, partly because I think the like real world creepiness factor is still really real. And I don't I don't know how to sort through that. Very high. Yeah. It's just like even just like walking around, like if you just walk around a city, just holding up your phone like you might be taking a picture, you're going to creep people out, right? It's like whether or not you're actually doing anything, it feels bad and so i have not sorted through how to deal with that but i do think the uh the thing i'm most excited to see about these glasses is whether the mic and headphones are good because it's essentially they're trying to do this like personal audio speaker thing where you can hear it but nobody else can it has five mics in the glasses including one on your nose that's supposed to do a better job of picking up your voice, which makes sense. If that works, that's pretty cool. I don't like being a person who wears AirPods all the time. I would like to be a person who wears AirPods less. And so if that's the kind of thing that I can use, like if I'm out on a walk or whatever, that's compelling to me. But also like it's whatever it's 250 bucks. Am I going to buy? I don't wear glasses anyway. If I already wore glasses, I think I would be slowly talking myself into this. But as somebody who doesn't otherwise wear glasses, that's a big leap.