What if I told you that the Meta Quest 3S is, in some ways, simply a more powerful Quest 2 with color transfer? “Yes, of course it is,” someone who has read our coverage might say, but iFixit shows how true this is in the disassembly video posted today.
The first hint of this is the headphones' Fresnel lenses, which iFixit's Shahram Mokhtari write in a blog post They are “100% compatible” with those used by the Quest 2. The headset also has the IPD adjustment mechanism of the previous headset; and shares the same single LCD panel, instead of using one panel per eyelike Meta Quest 3.
Legacy parts aside, iFixit found that the 3S uses two IR sensors for depth mapping instead of a single depth sensor. That “rare iterative improvement over the Quest 3” worked “exceptionally well in unlit spaces,” Mokhtari writes on the blog. And of course, it uses the same Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 SoC as the Quest 3 and is powered by Meta's newest Touch Plus controllers, sold separately.
As iFixit points out, none of this should be considered a bad thing. The changes make the headset cheaper: the Quest 3S costs $299.99, while the Quest 3 costs $499.99. It also means that if those reused parts break, it won't be difficult to find replacements for them, since the Quest 2 has already been around for four years.
