Top Apple Insider: Meta’s New Headset Is “VR’s Last Stand”

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Top Apple Insider: Meta’s New Headset Is “VR’s Last Stand” ©Diego Maravilla

Key Takeaways

• Meta unveiled its $1,299.99 VR Glasses on Sept. 23, and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman called the device “VR’s last stand.”

• If the headset flops, Meta’s earnings will barely notice: its apps made more than $5 of operating income for every $1 Reality Labs lost in 2025.

• Meta’s operating margin was 41.4% in fiscal 2025, even after Reality Labs lost $19.19 billion.

• Gurman calls Meta the number one player in smart glasses, and that’s the hardware story to watch.

Meta Platforms (META:NASDAQ) unveiled its lightest VR device yet at its Connect event on Sept. 23. The $1,299.99 Meta VR Glasses weigh about 100 grams because the processor, battery, and storage sit in a separate 300-gram puck. They’re due in spring 2027.

On the Oct. 8 episode of Bloomberg’s Power On podcast, Vlad Savov said the launch would settle an old question: “Was it the hardware that was holding it back, or was it the content?”

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, best known for breaking Apple news, put it more bluntly:

“This is VR’s last stand. If this device at this weight and price point and functionality is not what makes VR successful, nothing will.”

No pressure, then.

Two very different hardware stories

Gurman is down on VR, though he has plenty of praise for the rest of Meta’s hardware. He thinks Meta’s move to put its smart glasses under the Ray-Ban and Oakley brands is going to “go down as a big business textbook success story.”

On smart glasses and spatial computing more broadly, he was even clearer: “You have to look at Meta and consider them the number one player in the space.”

That lead matters because Apple (AAPL:NASDAQ) is the rival everyone’s waiting on. Gurman thinks Apple will launch smart glasses and that “they’ll be very successful just because of the Apple brand.” He also said, “Apple is still a year away.”

So far, the glasses look like a win, but the headset is still unproven, and it hasn’t come cheap.

The bill so far

Meta doesn’t report VR results on their own. According to Meta’s annual report, Reality Labs, which holds the headsets and the glasses alike, lost $19.19 billion in 2025, up from $17.73 billion in 2024. Over the same year, the Family of Apps segment earned $102.47 billion in operating income.

In other words, the apps made more than $5 for every $1 Reality Labs lost. That’s why Meta’s company-wide operating margin has stayed high through years of those losses…

Here’s the math on the latest year. Meta’s operating income was $83.28 billion on $200.97 billion of revenue in 2025. Add back the Reality Labs loss, and operating income would have been $102.47 billion, or a margin of about 51%. So Reality Labs costs Meta about 10 points of margin, and Meta still kept a well-above-average 41.4%.