I preordered a Vision Pro. Mostly because as a potential developer, I’m always curious about new platforms and their potential. “But what about the Quest 3, which does almost everything Apple’s talking about?” The answer to that is actually pretty simple: I don’t want the Quest 3. And it has very little to do with the technology.

I don’t want the Quest 3, because fundamentally, I don’t trust Meta. I don’t trust Mark Zuckerberg. Do I think he’s a terrible guy? No – I know folks who know him, and I believe he’s sincere and well-intentioned. But I don’t trust his judgment on matters of data and privacy, and a real XR headset is a privacy nightmare.

I know folks who worked on the privacy side of the Quest. They were incredibly smart folks, who thought hard and deeply about the subject. But I also never trusted the end product, because *fundamentally* I don’t trust Meta and I never will. And I know that whatever those smart, caring folks did, it wasn’t *their* judgment that made the final decisions. It was Zuckerberg, it was the $.

It doesn’t matter what they say, because what they’ve *already done* with Facebook tells me everything I need to know. And because of that, nothing they say will ever carry any weight.

As things like XR and AI and the general total pervasiveness of phones & IOT and what have you gets … more, the thing I want out of a company is to believe in their efforts around privacy and trust. I know Apple is not a saintly company by any stretch (I’m with Epic re: store & monopoly, for instance) – but when it comes to trust and safety, it’s no contest. I’d easily pay significantly more for an Apple product than a Meta one, solely around how I perceive they will treat the data that’s necessary for deep interactions with this kind of product.

I know that for a lot of people, price beats everything, but I think more and more, how much companies can be trusted with data will become more critical, and right now, Apple’s sort of the only game in town.