Insider Finance - Business - Apple vs. Meta

Apple revealed its new Vision Pro mixed-reality headset last week, sparking amazement, groans, and memes.  

Comparisons were instantly drawn with Meta's Quest 3 headset. My boss Nicholas Carlson wrote that Apple kicked Meta's butt. And the price of Apple's headset, at $3,499, has been compared with the $500 cost of the Quest headset. Mark Zuckerberg himself has weighed in.

But comparisons between the Vision Pro and the Quest miss a pretty fundamental point, in my opinion. Apple and Meta's headsets are built around different visions of the future.

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

Apple is a hardware company. The Vision Pro is a new frontier in personal computing. Apple didn't mention the metaverse once when it unveiled the headset, and barely mentioned gaming. Instead, the influential tech writer Ben Thompson sees the Vision Pro as “the future of the Mac.” The $3,500 price tag is close to the retail price of top-of-the-line MacBooks. 

What do you think? Could you imagine yourself using the Vision Pro? Let us know at insidertoday@insider.com.

Some of the old guard are returning to Salesforce. In an internal memo obtained by Insider, Marc Benioff announced he was bringing back several executives who left to work at rivals including Amazon and Oracle. 

The memo also hinted at a firmer succession plan, suggesting that Salesforce’s president and COO, Brian Millham, is now the front-runner to replace Benioff. 

Read the full memo.

Also read: 

Benioff and Millham talked to Insider about where Salesforce is headed after “a difficult time.”

Young Americans are on edge. A variety of research shows that the high cost of living is their “top societal concern,” they’re not satisfied with their pay, and Gen Z are behind on credit-card payments.  

There’s a bunch of reasons for their anxiety, including student debt, general inflation, and spiking healthcare costs. But there's arguably no bigger factor than housing.

We all have to live somewhere, but the housing market has never been this unaffordable. Those who manage to buy are getting less house per dollar spent, while those who rent are seeing their landlords charging more and more. 

Why younger generations are so pissed. 

It started just over a week ago: The Atlantic published a disastrous profile by Tim Alberta of CNN CEO Chris Licht, portraying him as a leader with no vision and no backbone. It was an epic PR fail; one media insider told our editor in chief Nicholas Carlson that it was “like watching a snuff film.”

Licht’s downfall was swift. By Wednesday, he announced he was stepping down. And whoever takes the reins will be screwed: Cable news is dying, so they’ll be likely to fail at CNN.

Go inside the mess.

Also read:

Who will replace Chris Licht as CEO at CNN? These 12 execs could be in the running, according to company insiders and news veterans.

Who even wants to be a CEO right now?

For all the talk about a recession, it sure doesn't feel like a downturn is upon us. Bars are packed. Airlines are gearing up for record traffic. People are forking over thousands to see Taylor Swift.

But make no mistake, negative forces are pulling the economy down — and one of the primary forces is difficult to feel in real time. 

That would be productivity, which has fallen for five straight quarters year over year, the longest streak on record. And such a decline has been an indicator of recessions in the past.

Why this is such a big problem.

— Marc Benioff when asked by Insider’s Nicholas Carlson: “You've had two other co-CEOs before and both of them left. What's different this time?”

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