Apple CEO Tim Cook poses for a portrait next to a line of latest MacBook Airs as he enters the Steve Jobs Theater throughout the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on the Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California on June 6, 2022 .
Chris Tuite | AFP | Getty Images
Apple CEO Tim Cook recently explained in an interview with GQ why people might want the form of mixed reality headset his company is anticipated to announce in the approaching months.
The notoriously secretive company has been silent on the topic, and Cook didn’t confirm or deny the headset’s existence, but Cook spelled out his pondering on arguably the largest query mark: Why would anyone buy it?
In brief: art, communication, “creative” applications, and company environments, Cook told GQ.
“The concept that you would overlay the physical world with things from the digital world could greatly enhance people’s communication, people’s connection,” Cook told GQ.
VR as a tool, especially for communication, is not a novel concept. When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared his vision for the Metaverse in 2021, upending how people communicated was certainly one of the primary things Zuckerberg discussed. Meta has struggled to search out success with its virtual reality business, called Reality Labs.
But Meta’s struggles don’t appear to have put a damper on Cook’s nascent enthusiasm. GQ questioned Cook about comments he made in 2015, where he lambasted Google‘s attempt at a VR play.
Cook acknowledged his about-face, saying when “presented with something recent that claims you were unsuitable, admit it and go forward as a substitute of constant to hunker down and say why you are right.”
To his mind, it’s creative users, long at the guts of Apple’s business model, who stand to achieve essentially the most from virtual reality products. The CEO said that augmented reality technology could project a bit of art onto a glass pane, helpful for creative or educational use.
“It’s the concept that there’s this environment that could be even higher than simply the actual world—to overlay the virtual world on top of it could be a fair higher world,” Cook told GQ. “If it could speed up creativity, if it could just show you how to do things that you simply do all day long and also you didn’t really take into consideration doing them otherwise.”
Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has said that Apple, faced with a sluggish economic environment, has grown concerned about how a headset could be received. Then again, Bloomberg reported that the corporate expects to sell around a million units within the product’s first yr.
Read more from GQ.
