The Pico 5 is canceled. Long live… Pico’s Vision Pro competitor?!

No, seriously, don’t you have to announce a product first before you can cancel it? I mean, I don’t know about you, but as far as I know: the Pico 5 wasn’t ever revealed. Teased a bit? Sure, but that was before all of the insanity that happened to the Pico brand.

Oh, you haven’t heard? Well, basically, ByteDance — maker of TikTok and owner of Pico — decided to fire a lot of Pico employees and developers, and then shift focus to making headsets, because whatever it was doing thus far wasn’t making enough money.

But still, Pico may still be keen on making one of the best VR headsets in the future. After all, you’d have to be capable of standing proud alongside the ranking in order to be capable of competing with Apple’s upcoming Vision Pro headset.

And that’s not just my idea for a comparison. Those, apparently, may be Pico’s actual plans.



We already knew that the Vision Pro’s announcement sent ripples across the entire XR industry, so ByteDance suddenly developing a competitive nature is no wonder. But remember, there’s more to this: Meta is said to be partnering up with Tencent — ByteDance’s biggest competitor — in order to bring a new budget-friendly Quest headset.

So, given that ByteDance wasn’t exactly charmed by the Pico 4’s sales performance and that this Meta x Tencent collab is looming over the global VR consumer market, it only makes sense for Pico to change course.

An unfortunate side-effect of that, however, is that it’ll have to go up against the Vision Pro.

Now, Apple’s headset seemingly aims to offer user-friendly versions of pro-grade features. This positions the Vision Pro in a very specific niche, that is neither completely consumer-oriented, nor entirely enterprise.

And that, in a way, makes Pico’s decision even wiser, because almost no one is fighting to take up that niche, as if everyone is still waiting to see how well Apple will do first. Well, except Pico, apparently. So what’s the plan?

Codename: Swan. Buzzwords like “high-end” and “cutting-edge” are being thrown around, but this project is said to still be at an experimental stage. The source specifies that no time-bound promises are being made yet.

So, basically, the only thing we know is the general direction in which Pico has decided to steer its ship. Nice. Still, going up against a tech-behemoth like Apple is a risky move, albeit a brave one. If this report is true, could Pico pull through?