In a new interview, Apple CEO Tim Cook has dropped hints about the upcoming mixed reality headset the company is developing. The conversation with GQ journalist Zach Baron covered multiple aspects of Cook’s career, presidency and personal life, but where we found the most interesting is in the comments regarding the new Apple Reality Pro.
A very interesting interview just a few weeks before WWDC 2023.
According to rumors, we expect Apple to present the new extended reality helmet at WWDC 2023, which will begin on June 5. Tim Cook has already talked about the importance of augmented or extended reality in the past and we can quote interesting phrases such as “in a few years we will wonder how we could live without this technology”. Now, regarding why Apple may be interested in augmented/virtual reality hardware, Cook said:
“If you think about the technology itself with augmented reality, just to take one side of the coin, the idea that you can overlay things from the digital world onto the physical world could greatly improve communication and connection between people. It could empower people to accomplish things they couldn’t before.”
“We could collaborate in a much easier way if we were sitting here brainstorming about something and all of a sudden we could pull something digital and look at it together and start collaborating on it and create with it. And this is the idea that there is, an environment that can be even better than the real world: overlaying the virtual world on top of it could be an even better world. So it’s exciting. It could accelerate creativity, if it could just help you do the things that you do all day that you didn’t think about doing differently.”
The idea of glasses, in fact, goes back a long way. In the interview, Baron reminds Tim Cook that in 2015 he stated that augmented reality glasses might not be the best idea. At the time, the executive commented that he saw it unlikely that Apple would create something like Google Glass.
Tim Cook’s response is truly remarkable and in a few words acknowledges that he was simply wrong:
“My thinking is always evolving. Steve taught me well: never marry yourself to your convictions of yesterday. Always, if you’re presented with something new that tells you you were wrong, admit it and move on instead of continuing to hold on and say why you’re right.”
Apple has always focused on the contribution it can make in any field. Tim Cook has been asked in the past what recipe or system he uses to decide what to invest the company’s dedication in. Tim Cook’s answer has always revolved around the user, what can be contributed, and this time he emphasizes the same argument:
“Can we make a significant contribution, in some way, something that other people aren’t doing? Can we own the core technology? I’m not interested in piecing together what others have done. We want to control the core technology. Because we know that’s how you innovate.”
In closing, Cook acknowledges that there may be skepticism around Apple succeeding where others like Google or Facebook have failed to make a difference, but he recalls that Apple has always been known for succeeding where it was most difficult. “In almost everything we’ve done, there have been a lot of skeptics”, Cook says. “If you do something that’s on the edge, it’s always going to have skeptics.”
Throughout the interview Cook drops little hints, such as that with augmented reality glasses you can have virtual works of art hanging on the walls of your home. Something that is not in the nature of virtual reality, but can be obtained at the intersection between our reality and that of the digital world. We will see what form all these reflections take at WWDC.
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