Meta announces $300 Quest 3S, a cheaper take on mixed reality

by with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: Meta

Quest headsets are commonly understood to be a loss leader. Analysts believe that Meta loses money with every unit sold. The strategy has been a big win for market share, as the social media giant is able to dramatically undercut competition like HTC Vive. It’s thus far been less of a victory for the company’s bottom-line. At its Meta Connect 2024 keynote Wednesday, the company unveiled an even cheaper version of its mixed reality headset.

With a $300 starting price, the Meta Quest 3S is a full $200 less expensive than the Quest 3. Clearly Meta’s strategy of flooding the market with devices is still in full effect with this one.

“Quest 3S is the best headset for those new to mixed reality and immersive experiences and for those who might’ve been waiting for a low-cost upgrade from Quest and Quest 2,” Meta notes in a blog post.

While the Quest 2 and Quest Pro are officially being sunset with this news, Quest 3 is sticking around with its own price drop. The 512GB model drops from $650 to $500. Meta will also be bundling the new Batman: Arkham Shadows title and three months of subscription Quest+ with all purchases of a Quest 3 or 3S.

Meta has, naturally, made some cuts to drive the new model’s starting price down to $300. That includes quite a bit less storage at 128GB, though if that’s not enough, you can get the 256GB model for $100 more. The 3S also sports a downgrade display. In fact, it’s the same 1832×1920 resolution display found in the Quest 2; this is, no doubt, the single largest cost-cutting measure, down from the Quest 3’s 2064×2208.

The field of view is also the same as with the Quest 2, at 96H/90V, versus the 3’s 110H/96V. The 3S is a gram lighter that the 3 and 9 grams heavier than the 2. The model also has the best average battery life, despite sporting a smaller battery than the one in the 3.

Image Credits: Meta

Judging the spec rundown, Meta could just as easily named the new headset the Quest 2.5. That said, the 3S sports 8GB of RAM like the Quest 3, along with the same Snapdragon XR Gen 2 chip.

The Meta Quest S3 is up for preorder Wednesday. It starts shipping October 15.

Data streams concept.

WarpStream is building a cheaper, cloud-native data streaming service

by with No Comment Tech

Data streams concept.

Image Credits: Weiquan Lin / Getty Images

When the open source streaming service Apache Kafka was created in 2011 at LinkedIn, it was a different world. Most companies were still on prem. The notion of cloud computing was just beginning to emerge. WarpStream, an early-stage startup, sees the value of streaming in a cloud-native context and built a new solution from the ground up based on the Apache Kafka protocol, but designed for the cloud age.

Today the company announced a $20 million investment.

WarpStream CEO Richard Artoul says that he and his co-founder, CTO Ryan Worl, found in their previous jobs that moving data into Kafka was complex and expensive and they wanted to change that. “If you were building something today that looked like Apache Kafka like we did with WarpStream, you would take a really different approach than was taken back in 2011 when Kafka was first designed, and so that’s why we think now’s a really good time for us to build something new that can actually meaningfully drive down costs and operational burden for people,” Artoul told TechCrunch.

The way they do that is by taking advantage of today’s cloud environment to separate compute from storage using an object storage service like Amazon S3. By taking this approach, they have been able to eliminate inter-zone networking costs, which often represent 80% or more of the total cost of running large scale Kafka workloads, according to the company.

“When you interact and store data in cloud object storage you get to sidestep all these networking fees that plague these big data systems when they get lifted, shifted into the cloud,” he said. “And a lot of the really hard problems around data durability and replication that Kafka had to solve on its own by copying the data three times, replicating it and making sure that data was never lost, we’re able to offload those problems to the object storage layer itself, and that ends up making the system a lot easier and cheaper to operate.”

Artoul and Worl were working together at Datadog when they helped develop a storage system called Husky. Today, if a Datadog customer is searching through their application logs, they’re actually using Husky. Datadog was also a big Kafka user. “Based on our experience building the kind of storage system on top of object storage we had built at Datadog, we felt like streaming systems should work the same way. And so last year we left Datadog to start working on it,” he said.

They are taking two approaches, one where customers can essentially bring their own cloud and install WarpStream, and one where they offer a fully managed serverless option. The BYOC version is available starting today. The company has also included a calculator right on the pricing page to figure out how much it will cost to run WarpStream.

The founders brought some of the folks who helped build Husky to build the new system, and today they have nine employees. The good news is that they are hiring and hope to double headcount by the end of the year.

The $20 million investment was led by Greylock and Amplify Partners with some data industry luminaries also chipping in with angel investments.