Meta announced in early 2024 it was planning to release Horizon OS beyond Quest in an apparent bid to become the ‘open’ alternative to Apple’s staunchly monolithic Vision OS. While this year’s big Connect reveals are behind us—with no announcements for new XR headsets to speak of—the company confirmed with Road to VR that partner devices are still coming.
Meta announced in April 2024 it was planning to open its operating system to third-parties, initially tapping three main companies to produce standalone mixed reality headsets running Horizon OS: ASUS, Lenovo, and Microsoft’s Xbox.
Admittedly, the Xbox headset doesn’t exactly count. From the get-go, it was expected to be a branding deal only, resulting in the June 2025 release of Quest 3S Xbox Edition—essentially a black variant of Quest 3S with matching Elite Strap, Touch Plus controllers, and Xbox gamepad. Notably, Xbox Cloud Gaming is available on everything from Quest 2 and up, bringing nothing substantively new to the table.
Both Asus and Lenovo devices are expected to be materially different from Quest 3 though, with Asus looking to leverage its Republic of Gamers brand for a “performance headset” and Lenovo developing “mixed reality devices for productivity, learning, and entertainment,” Meta said at the time.
Now, more than a year and a half since their announcement, those devices have yet to materialize. And neither has the expanded list of partner ODMs teased by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
At Connect, a Meta spokesperson told us that, despite the lack of on-stage update, the company is still actively working with partners to bring Horizon OS to more devices.
Why The Long(er) Wait?
Although the 2025 Holiday Season presents another big moment for Meta to not only onboard more users with its $300 Quest 3S for a second year now, the company seems to be using its release of partner headsets to essentially bridge the gap between device generations. And that gap could be growing.
In June 2024, The Information reported Quest 4 was slated to arrive sometime in 2026, with a more powerful ‘Pro’ style headset set to arrive in 2027. Updated reports from XR analyst Brad Lynch and data miner ‘Luna’ (via Tom’s Guide) from earlier this summer however suggest that Quest 4 may have been delayed to 2027.
On the face of things, the wait doesn’t seem uncharacteristically long; Quest 2 was launched in 2020, Quest 3 was released in 2023, and Quest 3S in 2024, leaving a three-year gap until the next-gen Quest.
Still, Quest 3S isn’t a new device generation per se, as it packs in the same chipset as Quest 3, allowing it to play all of the same virtual and mixed reality games, but makes it cheaper by coopting Quest 2’s Fresnel lenses and single 1,832 × 1,920 per-eye resolution LCD panel.
If those additional reports are true, by the time a Quest 4 arrives the current platform generation will be four years old—not long for a console lifecycle, but still the longest in standalone platform’s history.
And keeping users engaged with new headsets that fundamentally don’t rock the boat in how developers create games for the platform may just be how Meta bridges that gap in the near term. Whatever the case, Asus and Lenovo likely don’t want to compete with the next-gen Quest, making it a good bet we’ll see them sooner rather than later.
