Apple's profit margin on the Vision Pro, from a purely bill of material perspective, is estimated to be around 45%. But of course they have spent billions of R&D towards that project and it is far from out of the woods yet. It will be in the red for a few iterations over years.
Meta has sold more than twenty million Quest headsets of various types, and by most measures that project is still basically a money pit.
Meta quite likely also subsidize their headset. They follow the console market plan of getting money back on software sales, but a big issue has been incredibly low user retention.
With low retention, every sold device is likely costing them.
That’s 20 million headsets with ~zero to negative profit margin on each sale.
Meta’s investment in VR has been a dumpster fire, but the headset R&D isn’t where the overwhelming majority of that money is going. They’ve done everything from making VR movies to promoting 3rd party games most recently spending 400 million for beat saber’s publisher.
Meta is investing in VR movies? How much and where? I can count on my fingers the good VR videos from Meta, and I mean that from a tech point of view. The median VR porn has better video quality than 90% of videos on the Meta video app. Also Youtube VR is limited to just 4k and looks like garbage. VR video only starts to look good from 6-8k and 60fps.
More recently they also bought Supernatural (fitness app)
Meta are playing the long game with this, they are building out the eco system and the devices. They are doing a great job despite it being a money pit, the Quest 3 is an awesome device. It just needs a bit better software and better marketing around those killer apps, like fitness etc.
I don’t believe for one second that they are doing a great job. They have lost so much money. The only reason they haven’t completely abandoned the idea is because Zuckerberg has a controlling stake in the stock.
Meta has sold more than twenty million Quest headsets of various types, and by most measures that project is still basically a money pit.