Mark Zuckerberg has insinuated to his employees according to a recording of an internal meeting obtained by The Verge that Apple is Meta’s deepest rival in its race to realize the metaverse kicks off which would determine “what direction the internet should go in,” when it comes to creating AR and VR platforms.
The Facebook founder while disclosing that Meta and Apple had “philosophical” differences when it comes to the metaverse added that Meta will try to build a more “open” metaverse technology which according to Zuckerberg, Apple would continue to propagate a closed ecosystem for its metaverse technology.
Zuckerberg, while telling employees to brace for an “intense period” ahead, added that it is not really clear upfront whether an open or closed ecosystem is going to be better, however, about 37 organizations and companies including Microsoft, Meta, Epic Games, and Sony have formed the ‘Metaverse Standards Forum’ for industry-wide cooperation on interoperability standards needed to build the open metaverse and Apple is said not be a part of.
However, he states that Meta’s goal is to get its hardware into the hands of as many people as possible, as much as “a billion people using compatible Android phones into the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars a piece in digital commerce by the end of the decade,” providing the same revenue as Meta’s current ad business Mark Said.
The Facebook Founder who had in May told shareholders to he expects metaverse development to continue to lose money for the company over the next three to five years, noted that the game plan is to engage as many people as possible to lay hold of its device by not primarily charging a premium.
The metaverse is not the only battlefield that Meta shares with Apple, the companies have publicly argued over issues such as user privacy.
Apple is likely to launch another augmented reality (AR) in 2025 that will be more affordable than the one the tech giant is set to launch next year to join the metaverse race. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed that the iPhone maker will launch a higher-performance and lower-cost AR headset variant in 2025.
According to Kuo, Apple AR/MR shipments may reach 10 million units as soon as 2025 or 2026, thanks to the second-generation Apple AR/MR product segmentation strategy and ecosystem.
The tech giant is also reportedly planning to launch RealityOS for its headset.
In the meantime, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg while allaying the fears of job losses at the company was quoted during a meeting saying “I can’t sit here and make a permanent ongoing promise that as things shift that we won’t have to reconsider that (job cuts),” according to The Verge.
Meta which has recently frozen hirings for a number of products for certain engineering roles and also for low-level data scientists hinted that instead, it would basically be dialing growth to the levels that are thought to be manageable over time,” The Verge has reported.
According to a report by The Verge, freezing hirings indicates that the job cut would only affect products that are not profitable especially as Meta’s stock price has gone down 43 percent this year.
