According to a recent report from The Information, Meta is allegedly spinning down Quest Pro alongside a broader move to cancel the future ‘Pro’ line of XR hardware altogether. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth says however, “don’t believe everything you read.”

Meta has reportedly stopped ordering new components for the Quest Pro from its suppliers, The Information maintains. While it’s thought Meta will continue selling its $1,000 Pro-branded mixed reality headset as long as there is enough stock, the report alleges the entire Pro line has been suspended, putting a second-generation Quest Pro distinctly out of the question.

Speaking in an Instagram Stories post yesterday, Bosworth rebukes the claim that a potential Quest Pro 2 has officially been cancelled for good, saying that his team is developing multiple prototypes in parallel for all of its projects. Notably, he doesn’t address whether it’s spinning down the current version of Quest Pro, however he implies that the report of Quest Pro 2’s demise was the result of a disgruntled employee whose project was cut.

Here’s Bosworth’s statement in full:

“I have to explain this every year. There is no Quest Pro 2 headset until we decide there is. What I mean by that is there are lots of prototype headsets—lots of them—all in development in parallel. Some of them, we say, “that’s not the right one,” and we shut it down. Some of them, we say, “that’s the right one,” and we spin it up. What you need to understand is, until it goes out the door, it doesn’t get the name. So, there might be a Quest Pro 2, there might not be. I’m not really telling you, but I will say don’t believe everything you read about what’s been stopped or started. A lot of times it comes from someone who’s unhappy their particular project got cut when there are other projects that did not get cut.”

Still, it’s clear there’s been some turbulence in how Quest Pro was handled from the get-go. Originally launched for $1,500 in October 2022, Meta decided only a few months later it would slash Quest Pro by $500, putting at its $1,000 price tag today. Meanwhile, Quest 2 has seen multiple price changes, ranging from $300 to $400 for the same 128GB variant.

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Fluctuating prices aside, Quest Pro’s raison d’être has never really been clearly defined, as the company has nebulously pitched it to professionals as a would-be workstation. In practice, Quest Pro has been more of a developer kit for studios hoping to build consumer apps for the cheaper Quest 3, coming in Fall 2023 at $500. Meanwhile, Quest Pro users have reported a host of usability issues since launch, decidedly making it feel a little less ready for prime time than the company probably hoped.

Whatever the case, Quest Pro 2 would need a much clearer value proposition—provided whatever prototypes Meta has waiting in the wings also don’t also get cut.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • ViRGiN

    Damn. What shilltubers are going to make videos about now? Custom gaskets for pimax and lens inserts?

  • wheeler

    Sure, just like the quest 3 announcement timing had “Nothing to do with Vision Pro”

  • ViRGiN

    It wasn’t a bad headset. It just suffered from not being future proof enough with lack of real processor upgrade, and depth sensor. After price drop to $1000, and other “companies” charging about the same or even more for lackluster “options”, it’s not priced too badly. But Q3 is just around the corner and it will be superior in so many ways. If it launched at that price, i would have kept it. Now I’ll just wait.

    It seems like it’s still the preferred headset for pcvr, but if someone is still holding onto that platform, they have much bigger issues.

    • Sven Viking

      Also the state of its software at launch wasn’t ideal. Some features disabled until later updates, others with almost nothing available that actually made use of them.

    • Nevets

      Bigger issues? Pcvr is the apex of VR because standalone doesn’t come close. Obviously the issues of cost etc drive most people to standalone, but how could you imply that people who value the superior graphics and processing power of Pcvr have issues? Or have I misunderstood?

      • ViRGiN

        None of that matters when there is no development for it. Stop lying to yourself and everyone else. Ruth unlimited power of pc, 99.99% software is pure trash looks like native Quest game.

        Time to get real instead get very defensive about your only hobby.

        Besides everyone is playing gorilla tag and beat saber, and everything else has non existent player base, so don’t you talk to me about “higher graphics”.

        99% of existing gaming pc kenners didn’t go and buy a headset

        • Was ist ein «kenner» …??

          • ViRGiN

            auto correct! gamers

  • sfmike

    I bought a Quest Pro for the pancake lens and I’m happy I did and enjoy it everyday, except to the forehead pain it inflicts. The Quest 3 will make it pretty irrelevant.

    • Bob

      Agreed. The Quest Pro is an excellent headset and I use it most days of the week as well simply because the optics are just so pleasant to the eyes compared to everything else that I own. Its price and strain on the forehead (as you get past the 20 minute mark) are the only things holding it back from being an almost flawless headset.

      Despite having paid $1500 for the headset, I still believe the device needs to drop down to $799/$850 for the user to get the most value when it launched late last year.

      • Nevets

        Yet the strain on the forehead is a serious enough factor to stop you wearing it after a short period of time. It’s not a minor issue and it puts a huge gap between usable and flawless. I have the same issue with my Quest 2. They could and should improve the design, when if it means a separate puck. It’s a fatal issue for usability. They’re blind to it.

        • shadow9d9

          It isn’t universal. The quest pro is the first comfortable I have had. No issues.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          TL;DR: the problem won’t go away until HMDs switch from a “one size fits all” to a way more individually configurable type of headstrap, for which there are already examples.

          Serious discomfort for a significant part of all users seems to be a general problem for all headsets: they either provide a rather lose fit based on straps and padding, requiring pressing the HMD against the face and being somewhat uncomfortable in general. Or they use a stiffer setup that makes them much more comfortable for those with a matching head shape due to reduced pressure, but very uncomfortable for other with pressure now concentrated on a few points where the shape doesn’t fit. In general “one size fits all” doesn’t seem to be a working approach.

          The alternatives we currently see are Bigscreen Beyond with a custom made facial interface, Varjo XR-3 with adjustable everything, where position, length and rotation of top and back strap can be changed, and those are attached in a way that allows them to slightly rotate for a better fit without giving up the firm hold during use, and the Apple (upcoming) Vision Pro with a selection of differently shaped paddings for face and back of the head that will be individually fitted in the Apple store for every customer buying the HMD.

          All these come with added cost and effort. The Beyond requires a 3D facial scan and extra time and money for producing a custom face pad that won’t fit others, the construction of the XR-3 headstrap is way more complex, heavy, and you have to spend some time to find the best settings. And the AVP will (at least initially) require going to a store that’s keeping stock of the different paddings and assistance for finding the best combination. All these still make compromises matching their use case: Beyond sacrifices multi-user for low weight and covering even very untypical/asymmetric faces, XR-3 does exactly the opposite, with AVP somewhere in between.

          But something similar will be necessary to make HMDs comfortable for most. Ideally we’d switch from somewhat fixed materials to smart material headstraps/paddings that start “soft” to perfectly adapt to head/face shape, but then switch to “stiff” to evenly distribute pressure during use, allowing for light-weight, individual fitting on a button press without requiring complex re-configuration. Technically that’s already possible, my idea was something similar to the vacuum mattresses filled with small plastic spheres used to transport people with broken bones in both fixed and comfortable body molds, @XRC suggested using electro-active polymers that can change their rigidity when a small current is applied (and more).

          A pragmatic short term approach would be a 3D head scan like with the Beyond to automatically select a matching set of individual face, top and back paddings from a few dozen pre-produced (and therefore cheap) variants that allow different users to easily switch to their own set. That is something a company like VR Cover could already provide, but the question is how much more their customers would be willing to pay. The increased costs due to much smaller production numbers for even only five different shapes could make what is still a tiny niche product significantly more expensive, and their current offers are already at ~10% of the costs of the whole HMD. That approach could be much cheaper though if integrated into the design of e.g. the Quest 3 from the start and mass produced by Meta.

          • Nevets

            I suspect the preponderance of weight on the front of most headsets is the primary issue. I could be wrong but I suspect even the most custom or ingenious designs won’t match or surpass a well -implemented separate hockey puck approach.

          • It definitely seems like weight distribution rather than just weight itself is the bigger problem. Off-loading the battery helps with overall weight, but the headset still is predominantly front-heavy.
            Even the Bigscreen Beyond with its tiny 127 grams of weight, gets complaints for comfort long term.
            It seems to me like Pico 4 actually got this better than others by moving the battery to the back strap to act as a counterbalance. I haven’t heard many complains about Pico 4 comfort.

  • Till Eulenspiegel

    Is he telling the truth or lying?

    For what it’s worth, it’s Bosworth.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      He is telling the truth. because he basically said nothing.

      So, there might be a Quest Pro 2, there might not be.

      Which is obviously true, as it covers all the options. His whole statement only says that a) they create a lot of prototypes and b) they occasionally turn one of the prototypes into a product and give it a product name.

      There is of course a lot more to it, Meta doesn’t randomly create headsets and then release whatever they got, instead there will be Quest 4 and Quest 5 development targets already, even though not all of the plans will work out. The same way there would have been a plan how a Quest Pro 2 could look like before the Quest Pro 1 was even launched, which according the “The Information” will now be dropped due to the bad reaction.

      Bosworth doesn’t even address the question whether their plans have changed, he instead just redirects the attention to the general development process and suggests not to believe rumors without ever declaring this rumor to be false. It’s a non-denial denial, trying to contradict a rumor that would look bad for them with something that looks like a contradiction, but isn’t one.

      So he technically didn’t lie, he instead simply avoided answering whether their previous plans for a Quest Pro 2 have been changed. Usually non-denial denials are a form of damage control and a hint that the rumors are true, as the company cannot truly contradict rumors if they indeed consider dropping the Quest Pro line, but for strategic reasons isn’t willing to that announce (yet). All he would have had to say is, “no, we are still planing to continue the Quest Pro family”, but he avoided exactly that.

      • He said nothing, plus the sentence “don’t believe everything you read” is the same said by Kipman about the death of the HoloLens. Well, it didn’t age well…

      • Sven Viking

        Exactly — similar to his previous response when reports came out a few months ago that they’d cancelled plans to launch Quest Pro 2 in 2024 (except iirc at that time he said there would eventually be a Quest Pro 2, whereas now he says there may or may not be). Nothing he said will be false but he focused on the semantics of the product naming rather than the substance of the claims about changes to their release plans.

        It’s still possible these new reports (which focus on the discontinuation of the current Quest Pro) refer to that earlier prototype cancellation rather than a new one, though.

        • But as we move ever forward with tech,
          Meta HMDs will get better & better to the point where you start to think:
          “Why do I need a pro model when the ‘comsumer’ one is so bloody capable?”

      • Arno van Wingerde

        For all that he said nothing concrete, his answer is still more accurate than the article he referred to.

        Quest Pro”1″ was a failure by most accounts, so that makes a Quest Pro2 less attractive, particularly if development money is somewhat more restrained. So it seems perfectly reasonable that Meta does not have current plans for the launch of a Pro2 or even dropped those it had.

        However, the moment Meta finds some prototype which would have a killer advantage but is deemed too expensive for a consumer device, the Pro2 may be back on the menu any time in the future.

        Eyetracking on the PSVR2 makes a world of difference, but with the Quest people would not develop for it because there are simply not enough devices out.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          TL;DR: Quest Pro ‘the product’ may be on its way out, but the strategy of also targeting prosumers/business and offering special features and headsets at higher price tiers for them will definitely stay and get pushed further, because they simply have to expand beyond gaming to make the metaverse a thing.

          I think it’s important to differentiate between Quest Pro as a product and as a strategy. The first version of the product tanked hard, with estimated only about 50K HMDs sold. It was a strategic product, with Meta wanting to break out of the gaming niche and really aiming to also cover a professional market with the promise of added productivity that could and would pay for technology not yet ready/cheap enough for consumers. With the metaverse still being the long term target, that strategy of expanding into other areas like work will rightfully stay.

          What will hopefully change is their approach to designing such a product. With the Quest Pro they seemingly added a couple of interesting features from their labs like the eye and face tracking to their Quest 2, and improved usability for the advertised hopping into VR for short conferences etc. with the easier to use halo headstrap, option to remove the facial padding to see the environment, self-tracking controllers and a charging base that makes sure it will always be ready to use. All very useful for what they had in mind/promoted as the use case.

          Where they utterly failed is providing the software for that productivity use case, with even Meta employees shunning Horizon Workrooms, very limited virtual monitor implementation, basically no integration whatsoever with existing apps and workflows and not much else. The technology and USD 1500 price would have been fine, if the Pro had actually provided the claimed benefits. But they basically decided to offer the Quest Pro to match their strategy, created hardware that made sense for the intended use case, and completely underestimated the effort and polish it would take to make it actually useful. The released product wasn’t, so it ended up being bought and reviewed as an advanced Quest 2 for enthusiasts, a role for which neither feature set nor price matched, leaving mostly the improved optics as a benefit, but not justifying the price.

          Given the gross miscalculation the actual product was based on, killing the Pro and Pro 2 makes a lot of sense. But offering higher hardware tiers with advanced features at a significantly higher price also still makes a lot of sense, as does trying to expand use cases. So we may not see another HMD called Quest Pro, but maybe a Quest 3 Plus/Advanced/Next that incorporates features like eye and face tracking, targeting enthusiasts/prosumers and primarily existing use cases. This would allow Meta to gradually introduce more business oriented functionality and could over time again lead to a purely Pro oriented line of HMDs, instead of trying to sell it as a completely different product category right from a start despite a lack of matching applications, in the hope that a not yet existing market will suddenly pop up all by itself.

          At least it would if they have finally learned the lesson that it is better to stick to what people already (want to) use and gradually improve usability and features over time, instead of just throwing it away and starting again like they did with their multiple attempts at creating the sticky social VR user space that will be essential for all their metaverse plans.

    • Dave

      I agree with the others, you can draw as much from Boswoths statement that you can draw fom the incident with the disgruntled employee, in other words nothing.

      Let’s supose for a second the disgruntled employee was correct and they were working on a Quest Pro 2 line which got canned. It wouldn’t be conclusive evidence that the Quest Pro was terminated. They may be delaying the prototype until a new technology appears like the 2.1″ 4K OLED displays from eMagin.

      At the end of the day, we’ll never really know, it will just go silant I guess for the foreseaabke future.

  • kraeuterbutter

    the feature, that you can use it – its even standard – without gasket is for me a great feature
    wish that more headset would offer that
    the pico4 does work that way for me great too, after slight modification

    • You don’t find using an HMD *without*
      a facegasket to be, shall we say, lackluster …?
      Well if that’s what you’re OK with, then it’s fine, I guess.

      • ViRGiN

        It’s actually not bad at all.
        One the things that have to be tried to make an opinion. But yeah paid accessory was stupid.

  • Rodney McKay

    “Rebuts”, not “rebukes”.

    • Sven Viking

      To be fair his statement was more of a general rebuke than a refutation of their specific claims :).

  • heli0s

    With Apple entering the game targeting the business user, coupled with the poor sales of the Quest Pro, it seems like clear business sense that they would turn tail and run from the enterprise segment. Meta tested these waters with the Pro and it wasn’t good. It doesn’t take an MBA to realize they should double down on their consumer device with Quest 3 and make that the best they can.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      Running away from enterprise is not an option if the whole motivation behind throwing billions at XR/VR/AR is becoming a third large platform owner next to Apple and Google, and making all that money back as the unavoidable middle man taking a percentage of all transactions. The metaverse idea doesn’t work if it’s only based on consumers/games, sooner or later they will have to succeed with HMDs for/in the professional market too, whether they are called Quest Pro or not.

      • heli0s

        Let me better clarify what I mean: I think Meta is realizing that whatever they have in the pipeline cannot go toe to toe with what Apple is about to release, and compounding that with poor sales of the Pro are seeing it’s a losing proposition right now. So, it’s better business choice to cut losses, regroup, and watch how Apple fares out of the gate. In the meantime I suspect they will redirect their resources to the Quest 3, which I think is the right move because their consumer line is still strong. It’s very possible they could make another run at the enterprise after learning more from Apple. Personally, I think they should focus long term on improving a single device that can work for both consumer and enterprise market, and it’s possible they are considering that too. But at the end of the day, let’s also not discount they have a VR fanboy running the company, so what makes sense from a business perspective may be irrelevant.

      • Guest

        No, their primary goal over all else is to monitize eye tracking data. They are more concerned about Apple blocking the eye tracking data!

  • Nevets

    Agreed. The two perspectives are not mutually incompatible.

  • fcpw

    As a product line that got shaved 33% off its price within a couple of months, it’s obviously going away. Not too mention the 3 and Apple’s Vision Pro make it redundant/irrelevant. But some folks gotta justify their jobs with pointless statements.