Stop comparing Zuck and Cook's headsets. They're built around sharply different visions of the future.

• Apple revealed its new headset, the Vision Pro, at its developer conference.
• The $3,500 AR headset has been compared to Meta's much less expensive headset, the Meta Quest 3.
• But this comparison forgets that the two headsets are built around differing visions of future.

Apple this week revealed its new Vision Pro mixed-reality headset, and comparisons were instantly drawn with Meta's own Quest headset.

My colleague Nich Carlson wrote for example that Apple kicked Meta's butt. Then the price of Apple's headset, at $3,499, has been compared with the $500 cost of the Quest headset. And there are lots of product reviews online, looking at how the capabilities of the two headsets stack up.

But comparisons between the Vision Pro and the Quest 3 miss a pretty fundamental point, which is that Apple and Meta's headsets are built around different visions of the future, something Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg highlighted in an internal meeting this week.

"I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important," Zuckerberg said, according to Alex Heath at The Verge.

I agree with Zuck on this!

Meta is a social media company. Its headset is probably best used for gaming, and the ads for the Quest emphasize movement. The cost of the Quest 3 gives it much more mass-market potential, increasing the likelihood that your friends might also have a Quest 3, and that you can meet them in a metaverse. The price is also comparable with the Xbox Series X.

Apple is a hardware company. Its headset is closer to a new frontier in personal computing. Apple didn't mention the metaverse once when it unveiled the Vision Pro at WWDC, and barely mentioned gaming. The price, at $3,500, is closer to the retail price for top-of-the-range Macbooks.

Ben Thompson, the widely-followed tech analyst who writes the Stratechery newsletter, touched on this in a recent update. He wrote:

The Vision Pro is, in my estimation, not just good enough for doing traditional computer work in, but arguably better in many important ways (more on this below); that is important to justifying the high price. The Quest isn't (and I don't think the Quest 3 will be either), so it's not only good that it's a lot cheaper, but it also makes much more sense to be focused on a category like gaming in particular. And, in that category, $500 is the same price as the high-end PS5 and Xbox Series X.

Yes, the comparisons are inevitable. These are two of the biggest companies in the world, and the Quest headset was the best-known entry point into virtual or mixed reality until Apple entered the arena.

But Meta and Apple have differing visions for these headsets. To oversimplify, one is in competition with and an evolution of an Xbox, and the other is in competition with and an evolution of a laptop.