There’s never been a better time to buy a Meta Quest headset than this Black Friday

Meta Quest 3 being use dto play with LEGO

(Image credit: Future / Meta)

The Meta Quest 3 and Meta Quest 3S are both finally discounted for Black Friday (at least in the UK). The Meta Quest 3S is down to £229 at Currys, while the Meta Quest 3 proper is £444.99 at Argos (a whopping £20 off).

Yes, we've seen better deals in the past, but at least it's better than the deals in the US. There, you'll find the Meta Quest 3S is still $249 at Walmart – a solid $50 discount, but a deal we’ve seen a few times before.

Today's best Meta Quest 3S Black Friday deals

The Meta Quest 3 is the best VR headset ever made, with the Meta Quest 3S a close second.

Why?

Well, hardware-wise, they are both solid devices with very similar specs. Their RAM and Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chipsets are powerful enough to play the full suite of HorizonOS software we have at our disposal – including exclusives like Batman: Arkham Shadow and Marvel’s Deadpool VR – and they're both only a little over 500g which makes them fairly comfortable over exteded play sessions (I've use them for hours on end just fine).

But their real winning factor is the HorizonOS platform. The Quest ecosystem is, without a doubt, the best standalone VR platform in terms of software breadth, as anything you want to do in VR is very likely possible on Quest. The same can't be said for its rivals.

The difference between the headsets (other than price) is their displays. The Quest 3 is outfitted with pancake lenses, which not only slim down the machine but also wipe out the blurriness at the fringes that can appear in the Quest 3S's fresnel lenses.

That said, considering the Quest 3S is currently around half the price of the Quest 3 in both the US and UK, this downgrade can be easy to ignore, and right now, while I usually would give the Quest 3 the win, I can see the argument that the Quest 3S is in fact the world's best VR headset.