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Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Acquired LIVE event at the Chase Center in San Francisco, California, US, on Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024. 

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Meta announced the Quest 3S, the latest virtual reality headset to come out of the company’s Reality Labs division and a cheaper offering than its predecessor.

The device will go on sale on Oct. 15 and will retail starting at $299, down from the $499 starting price for 2023’s Quest 3. The device can be used to watch movies, as well as run VR fitness apps and gaming, Meta said Wednesday at its Connect event at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The company positioned the headset as a multitasking computer, putting it in competition with Apple’s $3,499 Vision Pro headset that launched in February.

Meta’s previous Quest devices are the bestselling VR headsets, with millions shipped thanks to heavy marketing and a lower price than many competitors, but those efforts have yet to spark a cultural phenomenon or a mainstream software ecosystem around VR. Including its acquisition of Oculus in 2014, Meta has poured more than $65 billion in expenses into its hardware efforts.

“I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time,” Zuckerberg said.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has defended the company’s spending as a strategic initiative to prevent Apple from controlling future hardware platforms.

Although there was hope among VR developers that Apple’s entry into the market would spur a wave of new apps and users, Apple hasn’t revealed sales for its headset and reports say that sales have been in small volumes, under 1 million units, partially due to its high price.

What it does

A Meta representative said the “S” stands for “start” — as in getting started with VR.

Many of the new Meta features that the company discussed on Tuesday for its $299 Quest 3S have counterparts on Apple’s Vision Pro, including a mode that allows for the device to be used on an airplane and another that simulates a large movie theater inside the headset.

Meta highlighted improved “passthrough,” the term used to described when a VR headset uses cameras and sensors on the outside of the device to display live real-time video inside the headset. That function is intended to make users feel like they are looking through a display and allows them to interact with the real world while keeping the headset on. For the Quest 3S, Meta added a dedicated button to turn on passthrough.

The company has emphasized the ability of the Quest 3S to multitask and run apps, positioning it as a computing device, instead of a game console.

“All the things you can do with a general purpose computer, Quest is the full package,” Zuckerberg said.

In demos provided Tuesday, Meta showcased the device running as many as four apps at one time on floating screens inside the headset, including a YouTube video, a browser, Amazon Music and Meta’s app store. Meta says the headset can handle six windows. But the demo experience was not smooth. The Amazon Music app crashed, window controls would disappear and Meta’s controllers would fall asleep after a few minutes if the user wasn’t pressing buttons.

Besides the Quest 3S, Meta also announced a price cut for last’s year Quest 3, bringing the price of the 512GB version down from $650 to $500. The Quest 3 has more advanced lenses and a superior screen with a higher resolution than the Quest 3S.

Additionally, Meta said it will discontinue the Quest Pro, its $999 headset launched in 2022 that never gained much momentum.

Eventually, glasses

Meta Orion AR glasses prototype

Meta

Zuckerberg’s justification for spending so much on VR and augmented reality is his belief that the technology will eventually end up in lightweight, transparent glasses that overlay computer graphics and information onto the real world.

Investing in VR software and hardware are early steps toward those glasses, which could take as much as a decade to develop, Zuckerberg has previously said.

Zuckerberg showed off an early concept of what those glasses could look like on Wednesday. The thick, black-framed prototype, called Orion, won’t be sold to consumers, but Meta says they will be used internally as the company continues working toward the consumer glasses it hopes to one day sell.

“This is where we are going,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg said they were Meta’s first “fully-functioning” prototype of the glasses, and would be physically tethered to a small “puck.” Zuckerberg also said that it would take advantage of a wrist-based interface, which came out of stems from the company’s 2019 acquisition of CTRL-Labs.

Meta’s Orion prototype comes a week after Snap announced its fifth-generation Spectacles AR glasses. Those thick-framed glasses will only be made available to developers, who must commit to paying $99 a month for one full year if they want to build AR apps for the device.

This isn’t the first time Meta publicly revealed a prototype of a future devices or research projects to signal to investors and employees where VR and AR technology is headed. The Orion glasses are an improvement on Project Nazare, prototype smart glasses that Zuckerberg announced in 2021, when the company changed its name from Facebook.

Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are powered by a Qualcomm chip. Qualcomm, Samsung and Google are working on smart glasses, according to Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon.

Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Meta does sell a pair of glasses with a built-in camera in partnership with EssilorLuxottica called Ray-Ban Meta, which start at $299. While these glasses don’t have any displays, they do have tiny speakers that allow the device to play music or interact with Meta AI, the company’s voice assistant.

For example, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses can now detect when a user is looking at a sign in Spanish and, if asked, can translate in the user’s ear, a new improvement, Meta said. The camera can scan QR codes, and it can also extract information like book titles out of photos it takes. Plus, they’re stylish and look like a pair of typical sunglasses.

“One of the most important things about this is they’re just good-looking glasses,” Zuckerberg said. 

Another new capability for the glasses is the ability to remember facts like where the user parked. 

Li-Chen Miller, the vice president of product in charge of Ray-Ban Meta glasses, told CNBC that when she travels, she uses the glasses to take photos of her hotel room door, and later, she asks Meta AI to recall the number. 

Zuckerberg is excited about the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which have sold more than 730,000 units in their first three quarters, according to market researcher IDC. In July, he told investors that they were “a bigger hit sooner than expected.”

Last week, EssilorLuxottica and Meta announced that they had extended their partnership to develop more smart glasses.

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Temu slashes U.S. ad spending, plummets in App Store rankings after Trump China tariffs

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Temu slashes U.S. ad spending, plummets in App Store rankings after Trump China tariffs

In just 17 days after launch, Temu surpassed Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat and Shein on the Apple App Store in the U.S., according to Apptopia data shared with CNBC.

Stefani Reynolds | Afp | Getty Images

Chinese online retailer Temu, whose “Shop like a billionaire” marketing campaign made its way to last year’s Super Bowl, has dramatically slashed its online ad spending in the U.S. and seen its ranking in Apple’s App Store plunge following President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on trade partners.

Temu, which is owned by Chinese e-commerce giant PDD Holdings, had been on an online advertising blitz in recent years in a bid to attract deal-hungry American shoppers to its site. With hefty spending on TV ads as well across Facebook, the company promoted clothing, jewelry, home goods and electronics at bargain basement prices.

The strategy was so effective that Temu topped Apple’s list of the most downloaded free apps in the U.S. for the past two years. Downloads of Temu on Apple’s App Store have fallen 62% in recent days, according to data from SimilarWeb, a digital data and analytics company. Ads for 50-cent eyebrow trimmers and $5 t-shirts that used to blanket Google search results and Facebook feeds have all but disappeared.

President Trump’s tariffs have upended Temu’s business model, along with its advertising strategy. Packages shipped from China are now subject to a tariff rate of 145%, while the de minimis provision, which allows shipments worth less than $800 to enter the country duty-free, is set to go away on May 2.

Temu and Shein, a fast-fashion marketplace with ties to China, plan to raise their prices in response to the tariffs. Both companies posted notices to their websites in recent days that warned they’ll be raising prices late next week.

“Due to recent changes in global trade rules and tariffs, our operating expenses have gone up,” Temu said on its site. “To keep offering the products you love without compromising on quality, we will be making price adjustments starting April 25, 2025.”

Sellers on Amazon’s third-party marketplace, many of whom source their products from China, have said they’re considering raising prices as they reckon with higher costs from the tariffs. Many businesses on TikTok Shop, the social media app’s marketplace, also count on Chinese manufacturers for their items.

Amazon launched a competitor to Temu last November, called Amazon Haul, which features items under $20 that are largely from China.

Read more CNBC Amazon coverage

The Temu app is now No. 69 in a list of the top free apps in the U.S., after consistently ranking in the top 10, according to data from Sensor Tower. Shein is currently at 42, down from 15 last month. PDD’s shares that trade in the U.S. have plummeted 22% this month, compared to the Nasdaq’s 6% drop. Shein is privately held.

Rival Chinese retailers have subsequently risen to the top of the app store ranks, including Beijing-based wholesaler DHgate, which surged to the No. 2 top free iPhone app in the U.S., and Alibaba‘s Taobao, which ranked No. 7. Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that viral videos promoting their cheap products have spurred the download frenzy.

A separate analysis by SimilarWeb showed Temu’s paid traffic, or search, display and social media advertising that drove visits to its website, has dropped 77% since April 11. Temu’s paid traffic previously outpaced nonpaid traffic to its website by 2 1/2 times, Ben Parkes, a consumer goods and retail analyst at Similarweb, said in an interview.

Marketing firm Tinuiti found that 20% of U.S. Google Shopping ad impressions were bought by Temu on April 5. A week later, that number had fallen to zero. By comparison, Shein’s impressions remained at 17% on April 12, while 60% of impressions were bought by Amazon.

Representatives from Temu and Shein didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Temu was previously one of Meta’s largest advertisers, but it appears to have dramatically scaled back its spending on the platform. As of Wednesday, Temu is running six ads across Meta platforms in the U.S., a review of Meta’s ad library shows. Temu is running approximately 27,000 ads across Meta sites and apps globally, particularly in Europe and the U.K.

That could be troublesome for Meta’s advertising business, which has gotten a significant boost from the discount retailer. Advertising analyst Brian Wieser at Madison and Wall estimated that more than $7 billion of Meta’s $132 billion in ad revenue in 2023 came from China. Meta is scheduled to report first-quarter results on April 30.

E-commerce analyst Juozas Kaziukenas said he expects Temu to turn its ads back on in the U.S. at some point, but that the company appears to be shifting its dollars to other markets in the interim.

“It doesn’t mean Temu usage has dropped as significantly as the app did,” Kaziukenas said in an email. “But it means that new user acquisition is gone.”

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Spotify restores service after Wednesday outage

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Spotify restores service after Wednesday outage

The Spotify logo is displayed on a screen on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Dec. 4, 2023.

Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters

Spotify was down Wednesday, with about 50,000 reports of an outage on Downdetector.

The company posted an all-clear to social media site X just after noon EDT, thanking listeners for their patience.

“Spotify experienced an outage today beginning around 6:20am EDT. As of 11:45am EDT, Spotify is back up and functioning normally,” the company said in a statement.

The music-streaming giant did not provide additional details about the scope of the outage.

Users peppered the replies to the company’s outage announcement with frustrations and memes.

“I’ll just hum to myself,” wrote user @alexissTyler.

Read more CNBC tech news

The company recently reported its first profitable year and said it paid a record $10 billion in royalties to the music industry.

Nearly 1,500 artists generated more than $1 million individually, according to Spotify’s annual Loud and Clear Report, and more than 80% of those in that pool did not have a song reach the app’s Global Daily Top 50 Chart.

The app has added new advertising features in recent months.

Earlier in April, the company released new generative artificial intelligence ads and reported that automated ad channels drove $2 billion in ad spending with digital audio since the beginning of the year.

Out of the company’s 675 million monthly active users, more than half are free users who are served ads when they stream music.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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AMD expects $800 million hit from U.S. chip restrictions on China

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AMD expects 0 million hit from U.S. chip restrictions on China

Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, attends the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit at the Grand Palais in Paris, Feb. 10, 2025.

Benoit Tessier | Reuters

Shares of Advanced Micro Devices slid more than 5% on Wednesday after the company said it could incur charges of up to $800 million for exporting its MI308 products to China and other countries.

“The Company expects to apply for licenses but there is no assurance that licenses will be granted,” AMD said in the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The new U.S. license requirement, which applies to exports of certain semiconductor products, would hit inventory, purchase commitments and related reserves, AMD said in the filing.

Read more CNBC tech news

AMD is one of the companies that builds the hardware behind the artificial intelligence boom. The company claims its AMD Instinct MI300 Series accelerators are “uniquely well-suited to power even the most demanding AI and HPC workloads,” according to its website.

It generated a “record” revenue of $25.8 billion in 2025, according to its February earnings release, but the new export restrictions could slow growth.

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AMD one month stock chart.

Nvidia, an AMD competitor, released a similar disclosure on Tuesday. The company said it will take a quarterly charge of about $5.5 billion for exporting H20 graphics processing units.

China is Nvidia’s fourth-largest region by sales, after the U.S., Singapore, and Taiwan, according to the company’s annual report. More than half of its sales went to U.S. companies in its fiscal year that ended in January.

–CNBC’s Kif Leswing and Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

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