Meta has spent over $50 billion on VR and AR and has almost nothing to show for it. The Quest 3 sold roughly 1 million units in Q4 2023. According to Deloitte UK data, the installed base is flat and only 20% of owners use a headset daily. That is a 2% DAU penetration rate. No platform survives on those numbers.
The hardware gap is real and unresolved. Meta has a device at roughly the right price that is not good enough. Apple has a device that is good enough on some specs but too heavy and too expensive. Neither company has found product-market fit. Some individual VR apps perform, but the platform as a whole is not growing.
The original piece is worth reading for its data-dense framing of VR alongside other pre-AI tech trends still in motion: e-commerce at 40% of non-food retail in the UK, Amazon's $50 billion ad business, and the end of peak TV. Evans is building toward a structural argument about which bets from 2022 still have legs. VR, so far, does not.
[READ ORIGINAL →]