Things you could buy instead of a $3,500 Apple Vision Pro, including 7 Quest 3s

Whether you want to buy one or not, today’s announcement of the first Apple-branded XR headset was pretty momentous. It’s the first wholly new Apple product since 2015’s Apple Watch and represents one of the few times Apple has boldly entered an unproven market.

Of course, the real news around the Apple Vision Pro — the official name for the new headset — is its jaw-dropping price. At $3,500, the Vision Pro is now one of if not the most expensive XR headsets consumers can buy.

The price isn’t exorbitant, though. Apple is doing things with the Vision Pro that no other company is doing, including the use of premium materials, an outer display that shows the user’s eyes and facial expressions, a controller-less I/O, and the incorporation of an M2 processor. So the $3,500 price is very high, yes, but it would need to be with everything Apple is offering.

Regardless, this high price got us thinking: what else could you get with that much money? The item that immediately jumped to mind was the just-announced Meta Quest 3. This similar consumer-focused headset lacks the forward-thinking, uh, vision (sorry) of Apple’s headset but will still prove to be a capable device for most people’s AR/VR needs. That model will set you back just $500, meaning you could buy seven Meta Quest 3s for the price of one Apple Vision Pro.

Similarly, the PSVR 2 is a new-ish VR headset. That requires a PlayStation 5 to work, so its combined cost is around $1,000 ($500 for the PS5 and $500 for the PSVR2). You’ll need some games, so let’s make that $1,500. Even then, you’d still have $2,000 left over to get a really huge 4K television for when you want to play the PS5 without the headset.

Here are some other things you could get instead.

Things to buy over an Apple Vision Pro