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Meta Abandons Original Quest VR Headset (gizmodo.com) 54

Posted by BeauHD from the aging-hardware dept.
Meta is dropping support for its first Meta Quest VR headset. The device will no longer receive future content updates, and by 2024 it will no longer get any bug fixes or security patches. Gizmodo reports: Notably, users will no longer have significant functionality. Though Meta promised you will still be able to use the headset and its installed games and apps, Quest 1 users will no longer be able to join parties, and they will also lose access to Meta's feature product Horizon Home on March 5 this year. Users will no longer be able to invite others to their homes or travel over to another user's home.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced what was originally called the Oculus Quest in 2018 as the premiere wireless VR headset. The company released the headset in 2019 (so Meta is a little off in their letter when they said they launched the device "over four years ago"), and this was all before Meta officially renamed the devices and its various services in 2021. So the Quest 1 is working off four-year-old tech, and it would make some sense why Meta would not want to support aging hardware.
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Meta Abandons Original Quest VR Headset More

Meta Abandons Original Quest VR Headset

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  • Meta to customers: Happy New Year, suckers.
    • Meta to customers: Fuck you, buy the $1500 new headset!

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dohzer ( 867770 )

        Customers to Meta: We demand legs and semi-decent graphics!

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by c-A-d ( 77980 )

        Customers to Meta: "Nah. I can use that $1500 elsewhere."

      • Why is it a fuck you to not support things in perpetuity? It's not like the Quest suddenly stops working. And if you consider the "homes" and loss of support in Horizon I remind you that these are the two single shittest things about VR. No really as an early adopter I know a LOT of people with VR headsets including various generations of Quests. I've never experienced nor met anyone who has invited someone into their virtual home, and the only experience anyone seems to have with Horizon is watching youtub

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sd4f ( 1891894 )
          A lot of devices, it doesn't make a huge difference. This is becoming a bit of a problem with online devices, where loss of support can mean switching servers off, or blocking those devices from servers, that invariably cuts off features or functionalities. There are a few instances of such things just becoming e-waste as a result of losing support, be it company goes broke, or servers are too costly to maintain.
        • Actually, the original quest was fairly unusable from the start, because it had a huge HDMI cable attached to it. (Yes, I own one; nobody uses it.) Granted, it didn't run out of batteries after 3 hours like the new $1500 one does...

          • The Quest never had a huge HDMI attached to it. You're thinking of the Rift. The fact you don't like tethered VR is on you, that doesn't make it unusable. Yes I own 2 tethered VR headsets. I use the better of the two every other day, my RiftS got a fuckton of use but sits on a shelf being made obsolete, not because of the tether, but because there are better quality devices out there.

            Two of my friends have Quests and Quest2s, the first thing both of them bought is the QuestLink cable, both of them almost ex

      • Is as if people think "Meta" is supposed to be a commune, or a charity, that they don't have to answer to people called "shareholders", and maximize this thing called "profit", and put these two above all else.

          Yeah it's shitty, but that's life and capitalism us Americans worship so very much. And I never understood the kumbaya cult following by Apple fanboys, since Apple too is a heartless multinational corporation.

        • To be fair, I had the same problem with HP discontinuing support for my flatbed scanner, because "We're not selling these anymore, so why should we pay someone to write drivers for it to work with the new version of Windows you just upgraded to?"

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          Is as if people think "Meta" is supposed to be a commune, or a charity, that they don't have to answer to people called "shareholders", and maximize this thing called "profit", and put these two above all else.

          Yeah it's shitty, but that's life and capitalism us Americans worship so very much. And I never understood the kumbaya cult following by Apple fanboys, since Apple too is a heartless multinational corporation.

          No, but when you're trying to build a market - whether it's the metaverse, or

          • "People keep saying VR is the next big thing - it might be, but I don't see how spending a few hundred dollars on a headset every few years makes me want to invest heavily in it. Especially since I'll have a collection of headsets for each piece of software I want to run."

            VR seems to be a fad that comes and goes every 15 or so years. What "Meta" is doing with their EOL will certainly help keep it that way, sure, but the goofy goggles is also what does it. At least what they have now is a far cry fro

    • My teenage son saved his money for months and got one shortly before Quest 2 was announced.

      Now he's never buying anything from Meta ever again.

      (tough lesson, valuable decision)

      • (tough lesson, valuable decision)

        Sorry what was the lesson? Never buy anything from anyone because a new product may be around the corner? Did his Quest implode suddenly on the Quest 2 announcement?

        • Lesson was "don't spend your money on pointless shit"

          • Lesson was "don't spend your money on pointless shit"

            What is pointless about a VR headset that works and will continue to work?

            If you want to have a discussion about whether his son actually liked the headset, let's have that discussion, but until then the only thing pointless here has been your comment.

      • Imagine if your son bought the Oculus, it was going to be fully supported for years to come, but he can't use it because 5 minutes in he is vomiting all over the place because his mind/senses can't handle VR which is a very common problem.

    • Except they bought this stuff knowing it was tied to Facebook and Zuckenburg's "cloud". Yeah "Meta" (Facebook's new alias) was really shitty ringing in the new year by kicking their customer base in the balls, but it's Zuckenburg's mainframe and the customers can't do much if anything about it..

      So once again, when you give control over to a mainframe someone else owns, you are now subject to the owner's thought waves, Don't cry and piss your pants when those thought waves drift away from being like

      • Do you not know what a mainframe is? Do you not know how the Quest headsets work? Is your brain intact?

        They're not using a connection to a 'mainframe' - they're locally-operated Android devices. They only use the 'mainframe' to purchase apps and manage the user accounts. There's absolutely nothing you need from MetaBook for the thing to work normally, and you can easily jailbreak them to work without anything from Zuckerbitch.

        • "Do you not know what a mainframe is? "

          Yeah, it was that central computer which you had to timeshare on, and if you were lucky you had a teletype (or a CRT based terminal if you were really lucky) to dial in and connect to it. Before that, you had to write and debug your programs on pencil and paper, translate it to punch cards, and then submit your deck to a human operator who would feed it through the machine's punch card reader, all the while hoping the operator does not mangle or mix up your dec

  • This makes sense, the OS on the Quest is Android based, and 4 years is a very long period of support for Android OS. Something to keep in mind if you are thinking about splashing out on a Quest Pro.
  • Why buy VR when it has a shorter lifecycle than a cell phone?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Guspaz ( 556486 )

      They discontinued it in 2020, though. While this move is disappointing, I'm not sure where you're getting a "one year shelf life" from.

      • From it being released in May of 2019?

        From 2019 to 2020 when they superseded it with the Quest2 and "discontinued" it is one year.

        They really are expecting you to just buy whatever bullshit they throw at you because "it's new" rather than it doing something more or better. The Quest 2 was absolutely zero improvement over the Quest in terms of performance or features. It was mostly just a rebranding to Meta and wasting the consumers' money.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Guspaz ( 556486 )

          Support for it was only just discontinued. Somebody buying the thing doesn't care when they stopped selling it, they care about when they stopped supporting it.

    • Because must consoom next product!

  • I am sure most of those headsets are abandoned already anyway.

    what does it do anyway?

  • Yeah.

    I've abandoned my four-year-old child for the same reason.

    • A typical human lives to be 80 years old. A typical piece of tech hardware 8 years. A typical human is kicked out of the house and left to fend for themselves at around 20-25 years old.

      Yeah your example is great, it shows Meta is treating its hardware children like people treat real children too.

  • You can change the name of your company. It's legal. FACEBOOK now pretends to be META. But Hey, Zuck willl take Meta and the stockholder will take FB. W'ok.

    Then you can pretend you NO LONGER SUPPORT OCCOLUS, you know, that company you bought. Oh no. Not you. Just that company that used to be you.

    FUCK FB
    FUCK META
    FUCK OCCOLUS
    And I will never buy a product from a company that won't support it.

    Ziuck - suck my zick.

    E

  • Meta was very concerned about the prospect of abandoning their VR users until they realized there weren't any.

  • ...say it ain't so.

  • When you 'buy' cloud dependent hardware, you are just renting it for an indeterminate amount of time.

      Maybe you will get lucky and there will be software hacks available so you can continue using the device past it being EOL'd, but don't count on it.

    • There's nothing cloud dependent about the Quest. Heck you can use it just fine with Steam if you want to. There's also no software hacks required. The only thing Meta is doing here is not supporting a few functions of there completely irrelevant and unused software. Games still work, you can still buy new games for it, and THANK GOD Meta stops pushing garbage firmware updates out which tend to cause more problems than they solve.

      My RiftS headset has never been more reliable than when Oculus EOL'd it. Though

  • killedbymeta.com

  • It's Less Than 4 Years Old (Score:3)

    by Feneric ( 765069 ) on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @08:21AM (#63198610) Homepage
    In spite of what Meta and the article claim, it's not over 4 years old. It was released on May 19, 2019 (easily verifiable).

  • "Quest 1 users"

    My brain said, "Quest's 1 user".

  • As long as Virtual Desktop continues to work properly so I can use it as a wireless headset for my PC-based VR stuff, I don't care what Meta does. I'm still on an Oculus account and not a Meta account, too, so I don't think they're really changing anything I care about.

  • I can't remember the last time I wished that a whole corporation would crash and burn. I mean, I'm aware of the issues with companies like Monsanto... I know to some extend what oil companies are doing in Africa... I understand issues of child labour and slavery in things like chocolate and diamonds... but Facebook has a special place in my heart. I actively wish it harm, and have for most of its existence. I didn't like it on day one, and I despised it pretty quickly.

    I know this isn't the straw that breaks

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