A few reports surfaced late last week that claimed Meta Quest Pro, the company's mixed-reality headset aimed at professionals and early Metaverse adopters, had been discontinued.
These claims were made when one of the manufacturers of the headset's parts, Goertek, was said to no longer be receiving orders for the VR headset's production, with The Information suggesting Oculus would let supply run out as the device's production ceased.
ZDNet, Dexerto, and others echoed these claims in the later parts of last week, also noting that Meta is shutting down production of any potential Meta Quest Pro successors, focusing only on the Meta Quest 3, which will arrive later this year.
Despite these rumors, the CTO of Meta, Andrew Bosworth took to social media to say "Don’t believe what you read about what gets stopped or started, a lot of times it comes from someone not happy that their particular project got killed and other projects didn’t."
On a potential Meta Quest Pro 2, Bosworth said "I explain this every year. There is no Quest Pro 2 headset until we decide to have one. I mean, there are a lot of prototype headsets – a lot – that are being developed in parallel. Some we’ll say, ‘This isn’t right,’ and we close the project. Some we’ll say, ‘That’s right,’ and we accelerate development.
"What you need to understand is that until it’s officially launched, there is no name. So, there may be a Quest Pro 2, and there may not be."
Based on that short video, it seems "Boz" is suggesting a disgruntled developer may have helped spark these rumors. Perhaps this points to a new supplier being used for future Quest headset components. As of yet, this is unconfirmed.
Moreover, when 12DOVE approached the PR firm that represents Meta's Quest hardware and asked if it had heard any updates, we were informed that no word had come from the Meta Quest team to inform the firm that the Pro headset had been discontinued.
In fact, the same blog post that announced the Meta Quest 3 may hint at Meta's future plans, as it says: "We’ll continue to sell Quest 2 and Pro alongside Quest 3, and we’ll keep shipping new software updates to make the Quest experience even better."
One of the purported reasons for the Quest Pro's discontinuation was poor sales and bad reviews. In our Quest Pro review, we found that the device's Metaversal integrations made it very difficult to recommend as a gaming platform, unlike the Meta Quest 2, which remains one of our go-to VR recommendations.
With the dawn of Apple Vision Pro in the year ahead, it looks as though the Meta Quest Pro will continue to be one of its few competitors in the premium mixed-reality market.
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