What if I told you that the Meta Quest 3S is in some ways just a more powerful Quest 2 with color passthrough? “Yes, of course it is,” someone who has read our coverage might say, but iFixit shows just how true that is in the teardown video released today.
The first clue to this is the headset's Fresnel lenses, which iFixit's Shahram Mokhtari writes in a blog post that they are “100% compatible” with those of the Quest 2. The headset also features the older headset's IPD adjustment mechanism; and it features the same single LCD panel, rather than using one panel per eye like the Meta Quest 3.
Leaving aside older parts, iFixit has found that the 3S uses two IR sensors for depth mapping instead of a single depth sensor. This “rare iterative improvement over the Quest 3” performed “exceptionally well in unlit rooms,” Mokhtari writes in the blog. And of course, it uses the same Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 SoC as the Quest 3 and works with Meta's newer Touch Plus controllers, which are sold separately.
As iFixit notes, none of this should be viewed as a bad thing. The changes make the headset more affordable – the Quest 3S costs $299.99, while the Quest 3 costs $499.99. This also means that since the Quest 2 has been around for four years, it won't be hard to find replacements for these reused parts if they break.