For better or for worse, a lot of people are quite willing to buy Apple hardware that only works with Apple-approved software. A lot of people are quite willing

For better or for worse, a lot of people are quite willing to buy Apple hardware that only works with Apple-approved software. A lot of people are quite willing to by hardware for gaming that works with essentially any software (GPUs, monitors, controllers, CPUs, etc). If Meta stands by it’s Facebook-required stance, it remains to be seen whether people are willing to buy fancy hardware that requires Facebook. The odd thing here is that I don’t understand what’s in it for Meta. I can see two ways that Meta makes large amounts of money off this initiative: 1. Revenue from hardware sales. With a good enough product, this can be huge. 2. Revenue from people who use the hardware for Facebook (and Facebook-integrated metaverse applications or otherwise delivering Meta ads). But #2 is achieved by getting people to buy the hardware (or competing hardware) and getting them to use Meta’s metaverse, which is achieved by making it compelling, not by forcing its use to use other applications. So I don’t get it. I think Meta should make their ecosystem more open. If Meta’s hardware is better than, say, Valve’s and supports the Valve ecosystem as well as Valve’s, then people will buy it and Meta wins. But right now, a major selling point of Valve’s hardware is that it works without Facebook.