Resolution matters a lot for productivity, and Meta's displays have more than twice the number of pixels. Image quality for the display will be much better on the Meta VR glasses because of the lack of interference from outside light. See-through displays sound good in theory but require too many compromises IMO. There's no such thing as "black" on a see-through display, only "transparent". Definitely try before you buy.

I feel like Meta's track record of VR device support has been decent enough. Quest Pro still gets updates even though it was discontinued almost two years ago. When they ended support for Oculus Go they released an update that unlocked the device and granted root access. I'm sure you can find some complaints on Reddit but looking at what they've actually done I think it looks pretty good.

> The Meta VR glasses will have better resolution I think, but then the Aura has access to the whole Android ecosystem - so that means real implementations of Microsoft Word etc.

Those aren't mutually exclusive though. Horizon OS is based on AOSP, and the more applications cross over into big screens on Android, the more Horizon gains the ability to leverage them too. Whether they actually show up in Facebook's store is a separate question, but I also have no idea how common the use of SideQuest is, just that the store is somewhat of an artificial limitation. (Google Play, on the other hand...)

> But the real choice is the unfortunate one of who is least likely to abandon the whole thing when it doesn't take off and leave you with an un/poorly supported device. Both companies have terrible track records on this.

Agreed. I would never buy a device like this from Facebook, and while glasses as a display are super useful, I don't necessarily see the need for a dedicated compute device for them when this experience could just as easily be powered by a phone. (I could maybe see replacing a phone with this, but more for particular minimalist crowds and not as a mass-market sell.)

> essentially identical for productivity

The devil is in the details. Every single UX design choice can have massive impact on productivity and creative tooling workflows. Don't predict anything based on the spec sheet.

The Oculus devices have and continue to have terrific support from Facebook

my entire interest in the meta vr glasses is on-device eye tracking; I think that interface concept has been under-explored.

Meta will never be able to compete ecosystem wise with Apple or Google/Android