Here’s why Apple’s CEO thinks people want a mixed reality headset

Apple CEO Tim Cook has opened up about what might make a mixed-reality headset appealing to consumers amid long-running rumours the company has been working on such a device.

In a larger profile on GQ, the executive was asked about the company potentially expanding its catalogue with some sort of mixed-reality product. Of course, Cook wouldn’t confirm whether Apple is indeed working on such a headset, but his response did provide some clarity on how it would approach the market.

“If you think about the technology itself with augmented reality, just to take one side of the AR/VR piece, the idea that you could overlay the physical world with things from the digital world could greatly enhance people’s communication, people’s connection,” said Cook.

He continued:

“It could empower people to achieve things they couldn’t achieve before. We might be able to collaborate on something much easier if we were sitting here brainstorming about it and all of a sudden we could pull up something digitally and both see it and begin to collaborate on it and create with it. And so it’s the idea that there is this environment that may be even better than just the real world — to overlay the virtual world on top of it might be an even better world. And so this is exciting. If it could accelerate creativity, if it could just help you do things that you do all day long and you didn’t really think about doing them in a different way.”

To that point, GQ notes that Cook then gestured to a nearby glass pane and remarked how it could be measured or displayed with art through AR. As Cook points out, these were some of the earliest use cases for AR, and he expressed interest in what other possibilities could come now that technology has advanced.

GQ also asked why Cook is now more bullish on the technology when he told The New Yorker in 2015 that AR glasses were “intrusive” and poised to be a “flop.” Laughing, Cook admitted that “my thinking always evolves,” pointing to a lesson the late Steve Jobs taught him to “never to get married to your convictions of yesterday. To always, if presented with something new that says you were wrong, admit it and go forward instead of continuing to hunker down and say why you’re right.”

Elsewhere, Cook was asked whether Apple is wary of such a market given the general lack of interest in products like Google Glass and Meta Quest. After a pause, Cook said his company has always faced “loads of skeptics” throughout its history, so it’s important to approach any new market in a different way. “Can we make a significant contribution, in some kind of way, something that other people are not doing? Can we own the primary technology? I’m not interested in putting together pieces of somebody else’s stuff. Because we want to control the primary technology. Because we know that’s how you innovate.”

Ultimately, Apple’s exact plans for mixed reality remain unclear. For years, rumours have circulated about Apple working on such a device without any official comment from the company itself. So far, rumours have indicated that the headset will sport a ski goggle-like design, Digital Crown-like dial for transitioning in and out of VR and swappable battery packs.

More recently, Apple announced last week that this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference will run from June 5th to 9th, although reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggested the headset will not be formally unveiled at the event. Instead, he says mass production has been pushed to the third quarter of this year, stating that Apple currently “isn’t very optimistic about the AR/MR headset announcement recreating the astounding ‘iPhone moment.'”

This follows a March report from The New York Times that Apple engineers question the commercial viability of the headset. This reportedly includes concerns related to pricing (the device is rumoured to cost $3,000 USD/about $4000 CAD) and the lack of a killer app.

Source: GQ