I am guessing they don't, if we use your metrics. I do get that discussing here are mostly US fanboys, so facts are hard to actually discuss rationally, but Apple made flops in the past, and underwhelming hardware and software they initially presented as second coming of Jesus.
VR is hard, sorry hard even for companies that had decade headstart and similar budgets and talents available to Apple.
It may actually help them if people have more realistic expectations than presented here, since its not possible it will be a perfect product from gen 1, day 1. Not even Apple ever achieved any of that on any sophisticated product. Since there are so many sub-categories in VR to compete in (home cinema, overall immersion, raw resolution, couch/room experience, controllers, comfort, virtual huge desktop, sound quality and so on and on) people should be realistic. And also expect to wait few years to have 3rd party software fully utilizing HW.
Price point should not drive expectations, Apple often gives upmark on its products compared to competition. We shall see soon.
Honestly the tech has stagnated for the last few years, with VR headsets actually getting crappier, (Meta Quest Pro is slightly better than 1080p?) I hope Apple lights a fire under them, it's 2023 the technology could be a LOT better. VR is one of those things where it either works perfectly or it's a failure, you need super high refresh rates, high resolution, and software to get a certain level of immersion that tricks your brain into believing it's real.
The Pro is sort of an aberration. Pixels per degree are actually higher than the Quest 2, but the panel resolution itself is slightly less (and the MiniLED tech is far superior to the regular LCD panel). The big upgrade was with the pancake optics, which are actually quite a leap forward.
Meta should have put the product on ice until Qualcomm had XR2 Gen 2 SoCs available. They couldn’t bump the panel resolution because of the SoC. Hell, even the extremely overengineered Touch Pro controllers only exist as an artifact of the XR2 not supporting enough cameras to do face/eye tracking while still having cameras available for SLAM tracking.
VR is hard, sorry hard even for companies that had decade headstart and similar budgets and talents available to Apple.
It may actually help them if people have more realistic expectations than presented here, since its not possible it will be a perfect product from gen 1, day 1. Not even Apple ever achieved any of that on any sophisticated product. Since there are so many sub-categories in VR to compete in (home cinema, overall immersion, raw resolution, couch/room experience, controllers, comfort, virtual huge desktop, sound quality and so on and on) people should be realistic. And also expect to wait few years to have 3rd party software fully utilizing HW.
Price point should not drive expectations, Apple often gives upmark on its products compared to competition. We shall see soon.