Carl St. James
2 min readJul 18, 2023

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Feedback 1: I’ve a feeling that price includes a hefty dose of profit margin and reassuringly expensive.

For what it is the Meta Quest 2 is very good at hand tracking minus the controllers, giving you that big TV and floating windows over a (grainy, low-res) feed of your surroundings. Its $300.

The PSVR2 has the high-res displays and the eye tracking. It has no internal rendering capabilities. Its $500.

The internal gubbins of the Vision Pro are an M2 board which given the volume Apple manufactures them at must not cost them more than $200. Remember its essentially an iPad Pro on the inside.

All the fancy LiDAR and FaceID sensors are used in iPhones at such high volume they can’t be more than a few bucks for Apple to build.

If we merged the PSVR2, Quest 2 and iPad Pro we are really looking at essential hardware totalling maybe $1000 to manufacture. The rest will be the external OLED, curved glass and R&D recompense.

But Apple don’t do cheap. If there released a device at $2000 people might wonder what’s wrong with it so they price it as a luxury to make it more desirable.

Then again there was a time the PS3 was the most cutting edge games console and cost £429 and it was outsold by what amounted to 2 GameCubes soldered together and a motion tracking TV remote.

The Vision Pro market won’t be big enough to bother with expensive exclusives so it will become home to the same experiences on other headsets, your Superhots, Tetris Effects and Rez Infinites. But at 10x the price.

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Carl St. James
Carl St. James

Written by Carl St. James

Making sense of modern technology, design and culture.

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