Apple Inc. Chief Executive Tim Cook, GQ’s latest cover boy, has a sales pitch for a mixed-reality headset.
“The idea that you could overlay the physical world with things from the digital world could greatly enhance people’s communication, people’s connection,” Cook told GQ, without confirming the rumored June 5 announcement of Apple’s
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Reality Pro headset.
Apple’s plunge into the so-called metaverse would offer a jolt to a flagging industry as well as serious competition to Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc.
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Alphabet Inc.’s
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Google, Microsoft Corp.
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Snap Inc.
SNAP,
and others.
Creative users, the lifeblood of Apple’s business model, stand to gain the most from virtual-reality products, according to Cook.
“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,” Cook told GQ. “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.”
Cook also looked inward during the far-ranging interview, explaining his persona and the challenges in succeeding the legendary Steve Jobs as Apple CEO. Jobs died in 2011.
“I always hate the word normal in a lot of ways, because what some people use to describe normal equals straight,” Cook said. “Some people would use that word in that kind of way. I don’t know — I’ve been described as a lot of things, but probably normal is not among those.”
Added Cook: “I knew I couldn’t be Steve. I don’t think anybody could be Steve. I think he was a once-in-a-hundred-years kind of individual, an original by any stretch of the imagination. And so what I had to do was to be the best version of myself.”
This post was originally published on Market Watch
