Consumer price increases happen constantly, and most of them arrive draped in supply chain language calibrated to obscure causation. Meta's Quest announcement broke that pattern. Meta's official statement covered by TechCrunch named AI-driven memory chip costs explicitly — not as a contributing factor, but as the reason. That directness made the announcement legible in a way that most hardware cost-pass-throughs are not: the consumer reading the notice could draw a straight line from data center investment to their shopping cart. The Quest 3 at $599.99 and the Quest 3S at…