iFixit’s Meta Quest 3S teardown reveals Quest 2 ‘hidden inside’

What if I told you that Meta Quest 3S is somehow a powerful quest 2 that goes beyond color? “Yes, of course,” someone who read our story might say, but iFixit shows just how true that is in a teardown video published today.

The first hint of that is the headset’s Fresnel lenses, which iFixit’s Shahram Mokhtari wrote in a blog post that are “100% compatible” with those used by the Quest 2. The headset has an IPD repair mechanism for older headsets, too; and it shares the same LCD panel, instead of using one panel for each eye, like the Meta Quest 3.

Legacy components aside, iFixit discovered that the 3S uses two IR sensors for depth mapping instead of a single depth sensor. That “extraordinary iterative improvement in Quest 3” worked “very well in dimly lit environments,” Mokhtari wrote in a blog post. Plus, it uses the same Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 SoC as the Quest 3, and works with Meta’s new Touch Plus controllers, which are sold separately.

As iFixit notes, 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 is $499.99. It also means that if those reused parts break, it’s not hard to get some of them yourself, since the Quest 2 has been around for four years.