Yeah it’s like saying that a Honda Civic has had many generations but it’s not as fast as the latest Ferrari.

It's more like saying that Ferrari is going to compete head to head with Toyota next year. Apple are experts in making all sorts of hardware at scale, directly and through partners. Now it's on display that they've always been ahead of Facebook which acquired a much smaller hardware maker and has had its own hardware products which flopped.

In your analogy I'd still buy a Civic lol. Also, it's more like, Tesla has the advantage in EV land, but you'd rather buy the first EV car from BMW?

Quest pro is $1,500 (albeit 8 months old )

Yes, Apple is priced quite premium but that is also their strength Apple can price at this level and still command enough sales , Meta or any other company cannot .

Even at the same price point (HoloLens 2 costs the same) as Apple it is hard to imagine another headset competing.

Also none of the concept headsets MZ has shown so far come close to this

For Apple, I don’t think it’s about sales. It’s about introducing something new to the mass market. So they want to sell this to developers (price doesn’t really matter). And early adopters/fanboys (for them it matters a bit more).

Apple is using these two groups for development of new software and for marketing. The fanboys will carry this thing around for a year or two and familiarize the general public.

Just a bit, but the $1500 price point didn't stick around for long. So really it's a $999 headset now vs $3500 "next year".

isn't the objective to capture and define the market?

metaverse vs spatial computing?

and whoever can make money for their respective business: sell ads or sell apps/integrate with rest of apple ecosystem?