According to a report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is readying a new batch of Macs to launch "between late spring and summer." This includes a 15-inch MacBook Air and a new 24-inch iMac. From the report: Apple's next iMac desktop is at an advanced stage of development called engineering validation testing, or EVT, and the company is conducting production tests of the machine. The next iMac will continue to come in the same 24-inch screen size as the current model, which was announced in April 2021. The versions being tested also come in the same colors as the current iMac, a palette that includes blue, silver, pink and orange.

The new iMacs will, of course, be more powerful -- with a new M-series chip to replace the M1. There also will be some behind-the-scenes changes. The computer will see some of its internal components relocated and redesigned, and the manufacturing process for attaching the iMac's stand is different. While development of the new iMacs -- codenamed J433 and J434 -- has reached a late stage, it's not expected to go into mass production for at least three months. That means it won't ship until the second half of the year at the earliest. Still, this is a great development for anyone disappointed that Apple's all-in-one desktop hasn't been updated in nearly two years.

Aside from the iMac, Apple is scheduled to launch about three new Macs between late spring and summer, I'm told. Those three models are likely to be the first 15-inch MacBook Air (codenamed J515), the first Mac Pro with homegrown Apple chips (J180) and an update to the 13-inch MacBook Air (J513). The big remaining question is which processors these new Macs will run on. We already know the Mac Pro will include the M2 Ultra, which will provide up to 24 CPU cores, 76 graphics cores and the ability to top out the machine with at least 192 gigabytes of memory. We also know that Apple has developed the next iMac on the same timeline as the M3 chip, so I'd expect it to be one of the company's first M3-based machines.

The AI Education Project has developed curriculum to help teachers and students understand artificial intelligence. From a report: With students taking advantage of ChatGPT for homework and term papers, there's a lot of handwringing about whether artificial-intelligence tools are appropriate for school. Alex Kotran said his group wants to make sure those tools are used even more. Kotran is the chief executive officer of the AI Education Project (aiEDU), a nonprofit backed by companies such as Microsoft, Alphabet's Google, OpenAI and AT&T, that provides free materials and teacher training to boost AI understanding in school districts. The idea is to teach kids about the technology, its limits and promise, and prepare them jobs where they'll need to use AI.

The group on Tuesday is announcing a national call for AI education with an expanded list of backers and partner schools at the South by Southwest EDU conference in Austin, Texas. So far, aiEDU has reached 100,000 students and has relationship with districts representing 1.5 million low-income and underserved kids across the country. The non-profit was founded in 2019, and Kotran thought it would take a few years before there was widespread demand from educators for these kinds of programs. "We were kind of wearing the T-shirt before the band was cool," he said. Instead the rapid increase in interest in generative AI with the popularity of programs like OpenAI's chatbot and Dall-E, its tool for digital images, has dramatically boosted demand, and the group could use more funding, he said.

Facebook's large language model, which is usually only available to approved researchers, government officials, or members of civil society, has now leaked online for anyone to download. From a report: The leaked language model was shared on 4chan, where a member uploaded a torrent file for Facebook's tool, known as LLaMa (Large Language Model Meta AI), last week. This marks the first time a major tech firm's proprietary AI model has leaked to the public. To date, firms like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have kept their newest models private, only accessible via consumer interfaces or an API, ostensibly to control instances of misuse. 4chan members claim to be running LLaMa on their own machines, but the exact implications of this leak are not yet clear.

In a statement to Motherboard, Meta did not deny the LLaMa leak, and stood by its approach of sharing the models among researchers. "It's Meta's goal to share state-of-the-art AI models with members of the research community to help us evaluate and improve those models. LLaMA was shared for research purposes, consistent with how we have shared previous large language models. While the model is not accessible to all, and some have tried to circumvent the approval process, we believe the current release strategy allows us to balance responsibility and openness," a Meta spokesperson wrote in an email.

Here's an interesting bit of news out of Mobile World Congress: Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 has been certified as the "world's first commercially deployable iSIM (Integrated SIM)." ArsTechnica: What the heck is an iSIM? Didn't we just go through a SIM card transition with eSIM? We did, but iSIM is better than eSIM. We'll explain, but the short answer is that iSIM is the next step in the continual march to reduce the size of SIM cards. [...] eSIMs are still a chip taking up space on your motherboard, and that's not ideal if you want to squeeze every square millimeter of space out of a phone. The next shrinking step is iSIM -- an Integrated Subscriber Identity Module. Rather than a chip on the motherboard, iSIMs are integrated directly onto the SoC. SoC (system on a chip) integration is the technology that makes smartphones possible. Instead of a thousand little chips for things like the CPU, GPU, RAM, modem, and a bunch of other things, everything gets packed into one single do-everything piece of silicon.

Individual chips require more space and power thanks to having to make motherboard traces to connect everything and having to deal with chip packages. Building everything in one chip, with the tiniest transistors you can muster, is the cheapest and most space-efficient and power-efficient way to do things, and now SIM cards are going to disappear into that big block of stuff. iSIMs will be measured in fractions of a millimeter, and as part of the SoC, they will continually shrink every year as chip process nodes hit ever-smaller nm measurements. It sounds like this is the endgame for SIM technology, and besides helping out phones, will be great for evermore space-constrained devices like smartwatches.

Police were investigating his neighbor. A judge gave officers access to all his security-camera footage, including inside his home. From a report: The week of last Thanksgiving, Michael Larkin, a business owner in Hamilton, Ohio, picked up his phone and answered a call. It was the local police, and they wanted footage from Larkin's front door camera. Larkin had a Ring video doorbell, one of the more than 10 million Americans with the Amazon-owned product installed at their front doors. His doorbell was among 21 Ring cameras in and around his home and business, picking up footage of Larkin, neighbors, customers and anyone else near his house. The police said they were conducting a drug-related investigation on a neighbor, and they wanted videos of "suspicious activity" between 5 and 7 p.m. one night in October. Larkin cooperated, and sent clips of a car that drove by his Ring camera more than 12 times in that time frame. He thought that was all the police would need. Instead, it was just the beginning.

They asked for more footage, now from the entire day's worth of records. And a week later, Larkin received a notice from Ring itself: The company had received a warrant, signed by a local judge. The notice informed him it was obligated to send footage from more than 20 cameras -- whether or not Larkin was willing to share it himself. As networked home surveillance cameras become more popular, Larkin's case, which has not previously been reported, illustrates a growing collision between the law and people's own expectation of privacy for the devices they own -- a loophole that concerns privacy advocates and Democratic lawmakers, but which the legal system hasn't fully grappled with. Questions of who owns private home security footage, and who can get access to it, have become a bigger issue in the national debate over digital privacy. And when law enforcement gets involved, even the slim existing legal protections evaporate. "It really takes the control out of the hands of the homeowners, and I think that's hugely problematic," said Jennifer Lynch, the surveillance litigation director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group.

In the debate over home surveillance, much of the concern has focused on Ring in particular, because of its popularity, as well as the company's track record of cooperating closely with law enforcement agencies. The company offers a multitude of products such as indoor cameras or spotlight cameras for homes or businesses, recording videos based on motion activation, with the footage stored for up to 180 days on Ring's servers. They amount to a large and unregulated web of eyes on American communities -- which can provide law enforcement valuable information in the event of a crime, but also create a 24/7 recording operation that even the owners of the cameras aren't fully aware they've helped to build.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economic Times: Meta, the owner of Facebook andInstagram, is planning a fresh round of layoffs and will cut thousands of employees as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the matter. The world's largest social networking company is eliminating more jobs, on top of a 13% reduction in November, in a bid to become a more efficient organization. In its earlier round of cuts, Meta slashed 11,000 workers in what was its first-ever major layoff.

The company has also been working to flatten its organization, giving buyout packages to managers and cutting whole teams it deems nonessential, Bloomberg News reported in February, a move that is still being finalized and could affect thousands of staffers. The imminent round of cuts is being driven by financial targets and is separate from the "flattening," said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. Meta, which has seen a slowdown in advertising revenue and has shifted focus to a virtual-reality platform called the metaverse, has been asking directors and vice presidents to make lists of employees that can be let go, the people said. This phase of layoffs could be finalized in the next week, according to the people.

Google's progressing toward its goal of building an AI language model that supports 1,000 different languages. The Verge reports: In an update posted on Monday, Google shared more information about the Universal Speech Model (USM), a system Google describes as a "critical first step" in realizing its goals. Last November, the company announced its plans to create a language model supporting 1,000 of the world's most-spoken languages while also revealing its USM model. Google describes USM as "a family of state-of-the-art speech models" with 2 billion parameters trained on 12 million hours of speech and 28 billion sentences across over 300 languages.

USM, which YouTube already uses to generate closed captions, also supports automatic speech recognition (ASR). This automatically detects and translates languages, including English, Mandarin, Amharic, Cebuano, Assamese, and more. Right now, Google says USM supports over 100 languages and will serve as the "foundation" to build an even more expansive system. You can read more about USM and how it works in the research paper Google posted here.

Google-owned Fitbit is removing several community-focused features on March 27, including Challenges and open groups. Christine Persaud writes via XDA Developers reports: For me, challenges were one of Fitbit's main strengths. You could strap a fitness tracker or smartwatch to your wrist, set up an account, and chances are at least a handful of your contacts were also Fitbit users. Then, you could add them as friends to compete and compare your progress. This seems like an insignificant "nice to have" feature, but the motivation it provides is precisely the aim of wearing a fitness tracker in the first place. And without open groups, you wouldn't have the opportunity to get to know like-minded users from around the world.

This decision eliminates one of the platform's best features: a sense of community. Reportedly, more than 31 million people use Fitbit at least once a week. That's a staggering number and a group of customers ripe for creating and maintaining an active community. At a time when the market is flooded with competing fitness tracker and smartwatch brands, it has become increasingly difficult to stand out. According to Statista, Fitbit has been leading the wearables space since 2014, accounting for almost half the worldwide market share at 45%. The company's solid grasp on the market (though it now faces stiff competition from the likes of Apple, Garmin, and others) is partly because of the unique Challenges and groups. While other companies, like Apple, have a version of Challenges, they're not as robust as what Fitbit supports. "Nonetheless, for anyone new to the market looking for a fitness tracker or smartwatch that can do it all and connect them to a wealth of information and a community of people, this news makes Fitbit a less appealing platform to consider," adds Persaud. "All we can do is hope for bigger and better things to come with Google integration in the future."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from InterestingEngineering: The U.S. Air Force's Global Strike Command awarded a new $75.5 million contract to New York-based firm Persistent Systems. The aim is to build a unified security system for 400 operational Minuteman III intercontinental-range nuclear missile silos secured in remote areas throughout the U.S. It will be the world's largest wireless ad-hoc network, helping secure the U.S.'s nuclear arsenal amid growing concerns over global nuclear security.

Persistent Systems will roll out its Infrastructure-based Regional Operation Network (IRON) offering across three Air Force bases as part of the Regional Operating Picture (ROP) program. According to the company, the new security network will cover an area of 25,000 square miles (64,750 sq km), making it the world's largest wireless ad-hoc network. The IRON offering is an easy-to-deploy Integrated MANET Antenna System on fixed towers and poles. It will allow the U.S. Air Force to connect 75 operation centers and more than 1,000 Security Force vehicles. The ROP program will allow constant communication to an Operations Center via the towers. Meanwhile, the personnel at that Operations Center will know the exact location of any Security Forces on a digital map. Both will be able to share critical data seamlessly.

As highlighted by Daring Fireball's John Gruber, Roku doesn't support IPv6 -- a next-gen Internet Protocol standard intended to eventually replace IPv4, the protocol many Internet services (including Roku) still use today. "DingleBog3899" writes on the Roku community forum: I work for a Native American tribe in the PNW. We scrambled to get the reservation reliable internet in the later part of 2019. We managed to cover most of the reservation with wi-max and wifi with a fiber back haul configuration. We are now slowly getting more stable and reliable fiber to the home(FttH) service installed to as many homes as we can, but it is slow process covering the mostly rural landscape doing all the work in house. Our tribal network started out IPv6, but soon learned we had to somehow support IPv4 only traffic. It took almost 11 months in order to get a small amount of IPv4 addresses allocated for this use. In fact there were only enough addresses to cover maybe 1% of population. So we were forced to create a very expensive proxy/translation server in order to support this traffic.

We learned a very expensive lesson. 71% of the IPv4 traffic we were supporting was from Roku devices. 9% coming from DishNetwork & DirectTV satellite tuners, 11% from HomeSecurity cameras and systems, and remaining 9% we replaced extremely outdated Point of Sale (POS) equipment. So we cut Roku some slack three years ago by spending a little over $300k just to support their devices. First off I despise both Apple and that other evil empire (house of mouse) I want nothing to do with either of them. Now with that said I am one of four individuals that suggested and lobbied 15 other tribal nations to offer a new AppleTV device in exchange for active Roku devices. Other nations are facing the same dilemma. Spend an exorbitant amount of money to support a small amount of antiquated devices or replace the problem devices at fraction of the cost. "Now if Roku cannot be proactive at keeping up with connectivity standards they are going to be wiped out by their own complacency," adds DingleBob3899. "Judging by the growing number of offers to replace their devices for free their competitors are already proactively exploiting that complacency. When we approached Apple to see about a discount to purchase a large number of their devices, for the exchange, they eagerly offered to supply their devices for free."

An Nvidia GPU driver update has caused some users to see inflated CPU usage after closing 3D games, which persists until a reboot. Nvidia confirmed the problem with driver update 531.18, and will post a hotfix on March 7. PCWorld reports: The company confirmed the problem with the latest driver update, 531.18, which was published on February 28th. An updated list of open issues (including some that didn't make it into the full release notes) was posted to Nvidia's support forum, and spotted by VideoCardz.com. Issue number 4007208 reads, "Higher CPU usage from NVIDIA Container may be observed after exiting a game." Some users are showing CPU usage of up to 10-15 percent in these conditions -- not enough to seriously hamper most gaming desktops, but more than enough to be an annoyance, especially if you use your PC for other intensive tasks. Like opening three Chrome tabs at once.

At the moment there's no easy fix, so the immediate solution if you're affected is to roll back your driver to version 528.49 from February 8th, available for manual download here.

Microsoft is getting ready to publicly test major new Windows features even earlier. While the software giant has been previewing changes to Windows for nearly a decade, a new Canary channel for Windows Insiders will allow anyone to try out "hot off the presses" builds of Windows that include major changes to the kernel, APIs, and other big parts of Windows. From a report: It feels like this new Canary channel is preparation work for Windows 12, which Intel and Microsoft have both been hinting at recently. "The new Canary Channel is going to be the place to preview platform changes that require longer-lead time before getting released to customers," says Amanda Langowski, Microsoft's head of the Windows Insider program, in a blog post today. "Some examples of this include major changes to the Windows kernel, new APIs, etc." We've seen Microsoft test underlying platform changes to Windows before that eventually shipped in a future version of Windows. Microsoft tested some display changes to Windows 10 preview builds before Windows 11 was announced, and the changes only ended up shipping in what became Windows 11. Likewise, x64 emulation for Windows 10 on Arm was tested early on and only ever shipped in Windows 11.

Researchers have announced a major cybersecurity find -- the world's first-known instance of real-world malware that can hijack a computer's boot process even when Secure Boot and other advanced protections are enabled and running on fully updated versions of Windows. From a report: Dubbed BlackLotus, the malware is what's known as a UEFI bootkit. These sophisticated pieces of malware hijack the UEFI -- short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface -- the low-level and complex chain of firmware responsible for booting up virtually every modern computer. As the mechanism that bridges a PC's device firmware with its operating system, the UEFI is an OS in its own right. It's located in an SPI-connected flash storage chip soldered onto the computer motherboard, making it difficult to inspect or patch. Because the UEFI is the first thing to run when a computer is turned on, it influences the OS, security apps, and all other software that follows. These traits make the UEFI the perfect place to run malware. When successful, UEFI bootkits disable OS security mechanisms and ensure that a computer remains infected with stealthy malware that runs at the kernel mode or user mode, even after the operating system is reinstalled or a hard drive is replaced.

As appealing as it is to threat actors to install nearly invisible and unremovable malware that has kernel-level access, there are a few formidable hurdles standing in their way. One is the requirement that they first hack the device and gain administrator system rights, either by exploiting one or more vulnerabilities in the OS or apps or by tricking a user into installing trojanized software. Only after this high bar is cleared can the threat actor attempt an installation of the bootkit. The second thing standing in the way of UEFI attacks is UEFI Secure Boot, an industry-wide standard that uses cryptographic signatures to ensure that each piece of software used during startup is trusted by a computer's manufacturer. Secure Boot is designed to create a chain of trust that will prevent attackers from replacing the intended bootup firmware with malicious firmware. If a single firmware link in that chain isn't recognized, Secure Boot will prevent the device from starting.

Ministers must consider changing the law to allow scientists to carry out genome editing of human embryos for serious genetic conditions -- as a matter of urgency. That is the key message of a newly published report by a UK citizens' jury made up of individuals affected by genetic conditions. From a report: The report is the first in-depth study of the views of individuals who live with genetic conditions about the editing of human embryos to treat hereditary disorders and will be presented at the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing, which opens at the Crick Institute in London this week. Scientists say that in a few years, they will be ready to use genome editing techniques to alter genes and induce changes in physical traits, such as disease risk, in future generations. In the UK, around 2.4 million people live with a genetic condition. These include cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease, muscular dystrophy, various cancers, and some forms of hereditary blindness.

"Genome editing offers the prospect of preventing such conditions affecting future generations but there needs to be a full national debate on the issues," said Prof Anna Middleton of Cambridge University, the project's leader. "These discussions need to start now because genome editing is advancing so quickly. Many affected individuals want to debate the ethical issues and explore what implementation might look like." Genome editing acts like a pair of molecular scissors that can cut a strand of DNA at a specific site, allowing scientists to alter the structure of a gene, a form of manipulation that does not involve the introduction of DNA from other organisms. In the UK, as in most countries worldwide, it is illegal to perform genome editing on embryos that lead to pregnancy.

Microsoft, having brought artificial intelligence to its battle with Google over search, is now turning to the latest AI technology to catch up with rivals in the corporate applications market such as Oracle, Salesforce and SAP. From a report: The software giant is introducing an AI assistant -- called Dynamics 365 Copilot -- for applications that handle tasks such as sales, marketing and customer service. Based on technology from OpenAI, the software can draft contextual chat and email answers to customer-service queries. It can help marketers come up with customer categories to target, and write product listings for e-commerce. The new capabilities are being released in preview form on Monday and are being tested by hundreds of early customers. For example, Italian aperitif maker Campari is trying out the marketing tools to concoct targeted campaigns for events around the Negroni cocktail.

Microsoft also said its next set of AI announcements, planned for March 16, will relate to "workplace productivity," a term the software maker usually uses to mean Office software. Business applications are the latest Microsoft programs to get an AI makeover so far this year as the company adds language-generation tools and chatbots to everything from its Bing internet-search engine to the Teams corporate-conferencing software. The strategy follows a successful debut for an AI programming tool called GitHub Copilot last year and Microsoft's expansion of its investment in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, in January. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella has said the company plans to overhaul its whole product lineup using AI and tools from OpenAI. In the business applications category, where Microsoft has operated for more than two decades but lagged behind rivals, Nadella ultimately wants to use AI to break down silos between formerly separate programs, each with their own workflows and acronyms, like ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) software. Instead, he said, they should be blended and have one AI copilot that can retrieve information and help workers with tasks. Still, like the Bing bot, Nadella noted Microsoft's Dynamics tool will also make mistakes.

A Federal Reserve Zoom event with more than 220 people was canceled after a user hijacked proceedings and displayed pornographic content, Reuters reports. From a report: The hijack left Fed Governor Christopher Waller unable to deliver his opening remarks because graphic images from a call participant named "Dan" began to pop up on the screen. In a statement to Reuters, Brent Tjarks, executive director of the Mid-Size Bank Coalition of America (MBCA), which hosted the Zoom event, said: "We were a victim of a teleconference or Zoom hijacking and we are trying to understand what we need to do going forward to prevent this from ever happening again. It is an incident we deeply regret. We have had various programs and this is something that we have never had happen to us." Tjarks adds that he suspects a security switch for the Zoom event that would have muted users and prevented them from sharing their screens was incorrectly set, though he could not confirm. The MBCA, whose roughly 100 members include banks with between $10 billion and $100 billion in assets, made the decision to cancel the event minutes after it was scheduled to commence, citing "technical difficulties."

Meta Platforms' WhatsApp has agreed to be more transparent about changes to its privacy policy introduced in 2021, the European Commission said on Monday, following complaints from consumer bodies across Europe. From a report: The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) and the European Network of consumer authorities told WhatsApp last year that it had not clarified the changes in plain and intelligible language, violating the bloc's laws. EU members' national regulators can sanction companies for breaches. WhatsApp has now agreed to explain changes to EU users' contracts and how these could affect their rights, and has agreed to display prominently the possibility for users to accept or reject the changes and ensure that users can easily close pop-up notifications on updates. The company also confirmed that users' personal data is not shared with third parties or other Meta companies, including Facebook, for advertising purposes.

"For years, California has championed high-speed rail as its future, even as its marquee project faces headwinds," writes SFGate.

"While the high-speed rail connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco slowly comes to fruition, a separate rail plan in Southern California has finalized an important labor deal, and construction is set to begin this year... to connect Las Vegas to Los Angeles with a new 218-mile rail system. On Feb. 23, Brightline announced it had reached an agreement to work with a coalition of major labor unions. The High-Speed Rail Labor Coalition includes 13 rail unions representing more than 160,000 freight, regional, commuter and passenger railroad workers.... The $10 billion investment is set to create 35,000 jobs during construction, with more than $10 billion in economic impact....

Brightline West trains can reach speeds of up to 200 mph. The company said its trains will cut down the more than 40 million one-way trips to Las Vegas each year by car or bus. It said it aims to attract 12 million of those trips annually and reduce CO2 emissions by removing 3 million vehicles and 400,000 tons of CO2 from the road. Moreover, the train is expected to relieve traffic on Interstate 15....

Brightline Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs Ben Porritt told SFGATE that Brightline West plans to break ground later in 2023. "Our construction timeline is approximately 3.5-4 years, which would have us opening by the end of 2027," he said.
"Riders can expect a travel time of just over two hours as the train reaches its 180 mph top speed," reports Jalopnik. "The line is expected to be an elevated line as well running above the desert floor."

Brightline trains in Florida are already reaching speeds of 130 miles per hour.

Formerly known as LinuxBIOS, coreboot is defined by Wikipedia as "a software project aimed at replacing proprietary firmware (BIOS or UEFI) found in most computers with a lightweight firmware."

Phoronix is wondering if there's about to be a big announcement from AMD: AMD dropped a juicy tid-bit of information to be announced next month with "openSIL" [an open-source AMD x86 silicon initialization library], complete with AMD Coreboot support....

While about a decade ago AMD was big into Coreboot and at the time committed to it for future hardware platforms (2011: AMD To Support Coreboot On All Future CPUs) [and] open-source AGESA at the time did a lot of enabling around it, that work had died off. In more recent years, AMD's Coreboot contributions have largely been limited to select consumer APU/SoC platforms for Google Chromebook use. But issues around closing up the AGESA as well as concerns with the AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP) have diminished open-source firmware hopes in recent years....

For the Open Compute Project Regional Summit in Prague, there is a new entry added with a title of OSF on AMD — Enabled by openSIL (yes, folks, OSF as in "Open-Source Firmware").... [H]opefully this will prove to be a monumental shift for open-source firmware in the HPC server space.
From the talk's description: openSIL (AMD open-source x86 Silicon Initialization Library) offers the versatility, scalability, and light weight interface to allow for ease of integration with open-source and/or proprietary host boot solutions such as coreboot, UEFI and others and adds major flexibility to the overall platform design.

In other words, this library-based solution simply allows a platform integrator to scale from feature rich solutions such as UEFI to slim, lightweight, and secure solutions such as coreboot.
The description promises the talk will include demonstrations "highlighting system bring-up using openSIL integrated with coreboot and UEFI Host Firmware stacks on AMD's Genoa based platforms."

"Meta is cutting prices for two of its virtual reality headsets as it continues trying to boost adoption for the nascent technology on which it has bet its future," reports CNN: The company announced Friday that it is slashing the price of its higher-end Meta Quest Pro headset by some $500, bringing its cost to $999, roughly six months after it was released. Meta is also lowering the price of its Quest 2 headset from $499.99 to $429.99. The price cut for the Quest 2 will go into effect in more than a dozen countries including the United States on Sunday. The Quest Pro price drop will take effect the same day in the United States and Canada and on March 15 in all other countries where it is sold.

"Our goal has always been to create hardware that's affordable for as many people as possible to take advantage of all that VR has to offer," the company said in a blog post.
Yahoo Finance believes Meta is lowering prices "because consumers are, well, just not buying as many as the company expected." The Verge agrees that the Meta Quest Pro was "an absolute boondoggle of a device" — but suggests that's not the whole story.

"if you look at the Quest 2, which most people use for playing games, as a game console, it's done reasonably well." Mark Rabkin, Meta's vice president for VR, told staff that Meta has sold over 20 million Quest headsets thus far. That includes both the Quest and Quest 2.... That seems like a small number, but the Nintendo GameCube only sold 21 million consoles in its entire lifespan, and the Xbox Series X and S are estimated to have sold approximately 20 million consoles thus far. So if you look at the Quest 2, which most people use for playing games, as a game console, it's done reasonably well.
Their conclusion? "Meta might have big ambitions for VR headsets and their place in the metaverse, but the reality is that the top software on the Quest 2 are all games.... And while Meta is thrusting metaverse experiences onto users, it's kind of ignoring that core gamer audience."