Meta's hiking prices on the Quest 3 and 3S, and it's sad that nobody's surprised

Call it a sign of the times. Meta has become the latest big tech company to announce imminent price hikes for some of its flagship products, in the form of new global pricing for the Quest 3S and Quest 3 headsets, making it harder for people to get into VR at a time when the sector is flagging in a big way.

The cause of the price hikes will surprise absolutely nobody, either. Meta cites the rising cost of manufacturing thanks to huge price spikes in memory chips, although it leaves out the bit where it explains that the AI boom is the single biggest root cause of those price spikes.

The outcome? The Quest 3S, which is aimed at being the affordable way to get into VR and certainly ticked that box when we reviewed it, will now be £30 more expensive in the UK and $50 more in the US, in its baseline 128GB version. The same bump is also being added to its 256GB version.

The Quest 3, meanwhile, gets an even bigger bump. It comes with 512GB of storage, and sees a price jump of £80 in the UK and $100 in the US. In case that all wasn't clear, here are those prices laid out again:

• Quest 3S (128GB): from £290 to £320 | $300 to $350
• Quest 3S (256GB): from £380 to £410 | $400 to $450
• Quest 3 (512GB): from £470 to £550 | $500 to $600

Meta does an amusing job of trying to spin this as not being all that bad, maintaining that "even with these changes, Meta Quest 3 and 3S remain the best-value headsets on the market". That might still be debatably true, but it doesn't change the fact that people will be getting a tangibly worse deal if they buy the headset from 19 April onward, when the new prices come into effect.

It wasn't great when the PS5 Pro got a £90 price hike, and it's not great to see the Quest headsets going the same way, but this does all underline how tough a period we're in for tech consumers. You have to wonder whether it gives any pause to companies like Meta, which is simultaneously making a pricing decision it knows will have an impact on sales, but also pushing AI integrations and branding in its other products.

One suspects that such doublethink is familiar in the corporate world, though, so don't expect any big 180s or pullbacks from AI, certainly while investors still seem to be going stir-crazy for any mention of it.

If you want to see the full global breakdown of all the new prices, check out Meta's blog post announcing the hikes here, and (needless to say) if you were about to buy a Quest 3 or Quest 3S and you're reading this before 19 April, then you might want to hustle and do so ASAP to save some cash.