The Quest 3’s battery only makes up about 20 percent of its weight

If the battery was external, the Quest 3 would be lighter, but about as much as you’d expect.

Earlier this week, we highlighted the fact that iFixit’s Quest 3 teardown revealed that the battery takes up almost all of the internal component space with the front panel removed.

Some other headsets like the Pico 4 and Quest Pro put the battery in the back instead of a clip, while the Apple Vision Pro has an external battery pack attached to it to detach it from your head entirely. But how much of a weight difference does that actually make for the Quest 3?

UploadVR contacted iFixit Lead Teardown Technician Shahram Mokhtari to ask him to weigh in on the removed battery. He did so and reported that it weighed just enough 64 grams.

In our review of the Quest 3, we found that it weighs 397 grams without the face interface and straps. That is, the battery is only 16% of this weight.

Of course, this figure of 397 grams includes side arms and speakers that you don’t feel in front of your face. If they are excluded, the figure may be somewhere between 20 and 25 percent. But still, this weight difference is not so significant that one would expect the battery to come out of the clip.

what could Making the visor lighter will free up the computing hardware. However, this would be much more complex from an engineering perspective and would likely require a thick and expensive link between the computing unit and the sensors and displays. And that computing unit would almost certainly have to be bigger and thicker than a phone, as a much larger battery and cooling fan would be needed to support the XR’s sustained performance. For example, the Magic Leap 2 Compute Unit is more of an interesting package than you might think.

However, there is a possibility that we will see a decrease in the weight of the headset clip from other tools as well. For example, OLED micro displays are lighter than small LCD panels because they have a higher pixel density and do not require a separate backlight layer. Additionally, while headsets like the Quest 3 are optimized for maximum performance, the future could see weight-optimized headsets with underclocked chipsets and lighter cooling assemblies – perhaps even fanless designs one day.

Now, as we mentioned in our review, thinner headsets like the Quest 3 do feel Very Lighter even if they really aren’t because the weight is closer to your face. With the Elite Strap or one of the many cheaper third-party options, you can now find a setup that can keep you comfortable in VR for hours.