Meta CTO on where Apple’s Vision Pro went wrong: “It failed what the market wanted”

Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, the CTO of Meta, says he knows where Apple went wrong with its Vision Pro.

“From an engineering standpoint, it’s wonderful and congratulations to that team. From a product standpoint, you can tell it was their first offering in the space,” Bosworth said during an interview at Bloomberg’s Tech Summit Wednesday evening, adding that Meta too had an initial flop in the face computer space with its Ray-Ban Stories. “First-generation products are hard. It’s not until the second or third generation you really figure out and hone things.”

Both companies, of course — in addition to much of Silicon Valley — are competing in the same space.

Meta is so far the leader in the emerging arena of AI-enhanced face computers, having sold more than 2 million Ray-Ban glasses since they came out in 2023. Apple is aiming to release its version of AI glasses at the end of 2026. Meta also makes the Quest headset, a $300 product that has been much more popular than Apple’s Vision Pro, which clocks in at $3,500 and has failed to catch on commercially. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Meta is working on a new, more expensive headset, code-named Loma, that will cost under $1,000.

“They made a lot of mistakes in terms of weight and where the weight was — there’s this glass piece way out off the nose,” Bosworth said of Apple’s Vision Pro. “ I think it failed what the market wanted for reasons that were predictable if you were in the space beforehand.”

Regarding higher-end displays, he said,  “It's just a cost-benefit question of, ‘Hey, sure people would love this. Would they love it at the price you would have to charge for it?’”

Bosworth thinks that eventually AI glasses will replace phones and headsets will be a better alternative to laptops. Meta, of course, doesn’t have a phone or a laptop and would love to usurp Apple products’ pride of place in consumers’ lives.

“The truth is with AI, you’ve got an obvious use case where it make sense to have wearable devices,” Bosworth said.

But Meta and the rest of the industry admittedly have a long way to go.

In a world where people buy 230 million iPhones a year, 2 million smart glasses is small potatoes.

There’s also the glaring fact that glasses are offloading much of their computing power to the phones, so they are in a complementary relationship until tech companies can manufacture glasses that offer more comparable computing and battery life without making them too heavy or otherwise oppressive to wear.

And as we’ve written before, it’s not clear whether people actually even want to buy what all the Big Tech companies are trying to sell in the AI face computer category.