Meta has given its professional Meta Quest Pro headset a temporary $400 discount, bringing its cost down to $1,099 in the US. The deal, which, according to CNET, runs for one week in the US and two weeks in the UK at a price of £1,299, at least temporarily mitigates one major point of criticism for the high-end headset.
The Quest Pro offers a few significant features that Meta’s $399 Quest 2 doesn’t. It supports full-color passthrough mixed reality with front-facing cameras, and it comes with new self-tracked controllers that are more compact, plus eye and facial feature tracking. The tradeoff is a heavier design that we had some notable problems with. For anyone who’s specifically interested in those options, the price cut makes it a more attractive choice. Perhaps not coincidentally, the sale price matches HTC’s new Vive XR Elite, which includes similar features to the Quest Pro and ships later this month.
Meta has pinned its hopes to “metaverse” virtual and augmented reality services as its older social network Facebook struggles to attract new users, but the technology remains nascent while competition is heating up. In addition to Meta and HTC, Apple may also be finally close to announcing a long-rumored passthrough mixed reality device. This week’s sale could let Meta preemptively shore up its presence in a market that’s still pretty small — without permanently committing to selling hardware at a major loss.
