Vantage | What Zuckerberg's takedown of Apple's headset says about brand rivalries

Mark Zuckerberg is the full-time CEO of Meta and a part-time reviewer of rival gadgets. His first victim was Apple’s new virtual reality headset, which is called the Vision Pro. Now, Zuckerberg’s company already has a VR headset called Meta Quest. So the Vision Pro is a direct challenger. It could take away Meta’s market. After all, Apple is a bona fide maker of gadgets. Meta is more of a social media company. So Zukerberg decided to review the Apple Vision Pro. Apparently, in his impression, nothing is good. Zuckerberg had very few good things to say about Apple’s product. He said the screen was good. He appreciated the eye-tracking feature. And for the rest, he found nothing so good. He says his headset is much better than Apple’s, and that’s a bold claim! Meta’s headset costs 499 dollars, while Apple’s costs 3,499 dollars. So the Vision Pro costs 3,000 dollars more, which is 250,000 rupees. Forget virtual reality; think of what that money can do in actual reality. So the price difference is huge, and Zuckerberg says his device is better. Meta has invested 36 billion dollars into the VR business. So here’s a wild idea: Maybe Zuckerberg is protecting his market. It is an interesting strategy, though. You don’t see such emotional or personal statements from him. Not unless he’s in the US Congress. Then, of course, it is apology time—sorry for stealing data, for hurting children, or for amplifying hate speech.

But this time, Zuckerberg is being proactive; he is trashing Apple’s product on social media. So criticism and promotion were rolled into one. It looks like Zuckerberg 2.0. Last year, he launched a rival to Twitter called Threads. The app itself is now hanging by a thread. But that is not our focus; our focus is on Elon Musk’s reaction to it; he suggested the app was a copycat. Musk also said Zuckerberg was a weak character. That led to a feud between the two men. The point is simple, tech titans going personal isn’t news anymore. It has become part of the game, and brands attacking each other is an old practice. For example, in an advertisement by BMW, they bid goodbye to the CEO of Mercedes-Benz, their rival. He was retiring after a long stint, and the ad shows the CEO giving up his Mercedes car, and later, he drives off in a BMW. Food wars are even feistier; Wendy’s, for example, is a fast food chain in the US. The brand trolls its competition on social media. Like when McDonald’s came out with spicy nuggets. Wendy said: “Must have scraped up the Burger King leftovers and slapped a price tag on them.” That must have hurt. Such jibes have become part of the game. It keeps them in the news for free, and when you’re rivals, there is more at stake, like the Cola Wars in the last century—Pepsi versus Coca-Cola. Everyone wants to be a hero. So brand rivalries have given us some great moments. Will Apple and Meta do the same? Well, Mark Zuckerberg’s review isn’t exactly a friendly jibe. It’s more of a takedown. Let’s see how Apple responds to it. Who knows, maybe the reaction will be limited to the Apple ecosystem! Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost_’s views._