Apple vs. Meta

On the agenda:

• Marc Benioff shook up Salesforce’s top ranks — and hinted about a succession plan.
• Want to know why younger generations seem so pissed? Look at the housing market.
• Inside CNN’s epic PR fail that made a mockery of Chris Licht — and led to his downfall.
• Everyone is getting less productive. That’s a big problem for the economy.

Stop comparing headsets

Comparisons were instantly drawn with Meta’s Quest 3 headset. My boss Nicholas Carlson wrote that Apple kicked Meta’s butt. And the price of Apple’s headset, at $3,499, has been compared with the $500 cost of the Quest headset. Mark Zuckerberg himself has weighed in.

But comparisons between the Vision Pro and the Quest miss a pretty fundamental point, in my opinion. Apple and Meta’s headsets are built around different visions of the future.

Meta is a social-media company. Its headset is probably best used for gaming. The cost of the Quest gives it much more mass-market potential, increasing the likelihood that your friends might also have a Quest and that you can meet them in a metaverse. The price is also comparable with the Xbox Series X.

Apple is a hardware company. The Vision Pro is a new frontier in personal computing. Apple didn’t mention the metaverse once when it unveiled the headset, and barely mentioned gaming. Instead, the influential tech writer Ben Thompson sees the Vision Pro as “the future of the Mac.” The $3,500 price tag is close to the retail price of top-of-the-line MacBooks.

What do you think? Could you imagine yourself using the Vision Pro? Let us know at insidertoday@insider.com.

Salesforce shakeup

The memo also hinted at a firmer succession plan, suggesting that Salesforce’s president and COO, Brian Millham, is now the front-runner to replace Benioff.

Read the full memo.

Also read: 

Benioff and Millham talked to Insider about where Salesforce is headed after “a difficult time.”

There’s a bunch of reasons for their anxiety, including student debt, general inflation, and spiking healthcare costs. But there’s arguably no bigger factor than housing.

We all have to live somewhere, but the housing market has never been this unaffordable. Those who manage to buy are getting less house per dollar spent, while those who rent are seeing their landlords charging more and more.

Why younger generations are so pissed.

Licht’s downfall was swift. By Wednesday, he announced he was stepping down. And whoever takes the reins will be screwed: Cable news is dying, so they’ll be likely to fail at CNN.

Go inside the mess.

Also read:

Who will replace Chris Licht as CEO at CNN? These 12 execs could be in the running, according to company insiders and news veterans.

Who even wants to be a CEO right now?

But make no mistake, negative forces are pulling the economy down — and one of the primary forces is difficult to feel in real time.

That would be productivity, which has fallen for five straight quarters year over year, the longest streak on record. And such a decline has been an indicator of recessions in the past.

Why this is such a big problem.

Loneliness epidemic, hedge funds, & more

• A top Wall Street firm wrote a brutal open letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
• Americans are trapped in a loneliness epidemic, and AI chatbots like ChatGPT could make it even worse.
• A trader made a $7.5 million windfall on a suspiciously timed investment ahead of a surprise debt-limit-deal concession.
• Companies from Google to Mastercard are close to killing off passwords forever.
• The typical Singaporean millennial was raised to chase cars, cash, and condos.
• All-cash homebuyers are becoming “disruptive” to the housing market.
• UBS recommends buying these 53 stocks as they profit from the AI revolution.
• A new study shows that ChatGPT is a more humane doctor than human doctors.
• Hedge-fund numbers are rolling in. See how Citadel, Millennium, and other big names fared.

Next up in our event series on the secrets of short-form video: Distribution 101. Join Insider on June 15 at 1 p.m. ET as we do a deep dive into best practices for distribution strategy. Register here.

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