Visionary Steve Jobs created breakthrough versions of the personal computer, portable media player, music store, smartphone, and tablet that people actually wanted to use — sending Apple on its way to becoming the $2.7 trillion juggernaut it is today. Now, just as everyone seems to be tiring of the metaverse, Steve Jobs’ successor comes up with the company’s first mixed-reality headset.
Dave Lee for Bloomberg Opinion:
[Tim Cook] is yet to come up with a bold new idea of his own. Tim Cook, the steady-handed supply chain expert, has instead built on top those existing successes. Even the Apple Watch, which came out almost four years after Jobs’ death, had the late visionary’s input in the development, if not the execution.
See also: Contrary to popular belief, Steve Jobs knew about Apple Watch – February 13, 2023
Finally, we may be about to see a Cook innovation. And boy, what a risk it is: a punt on a new technology quite unlike any in Apple’s past.
In June, at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple is expected to share long-awaited details of its mixed reality headset; a device that offers both augmented reality and virtual reality. The first overlays imagery onto your real surroundings; the second immerses you in a fully digital environment.
At the onset, Apple’s headset will not be a mass-market product. At $3,000, according to reporting by Bloomberg News, it will be almost seven times as expensive as Meta Platforms Inc.’s Quest 2, the biggest selling VR headset — 18 million units to date, according to CCS Insight.
Quite how much we’ll see of the headset at WWDC is not clear. Shipments in 2023 are expected to be a tiny fraction of Apple’s other products. But we can expect a product pitch outlining why we might one day want one. This will be a challenge: Other Apple products had a proven utility before hitting the market… There is no such enthusiasm for a mixed reality headset.
MacDailyNews Take: Is it really a risk? If it doesn’t catch on, Apple can afford hundreds of write-offs at this point. This isn’t like iMac, a bet-the-company product.
Smartly, Apple isn’t interested in the “metaverse” – escaping reality – as much as they are interested in augmenting reality to help improve myriad experiences from work to play. – MacDailyNews, April 19, 2023
After all, Second Life is so 2003. – MacDailyNews, January 10, 2022
Don’t expect Apple’s headset to be laser-focused on precisely the right things as launch:
The glaring lack of a visionary who is immersed and invested in product design who is a single point of approval – Steve Jobs – means that early adopters have to take Jobs’ place en masse to perform similar functions – albeit over a significantly longer period of time – à la Apple Watch. – MacDailyNews, March 28, 2023
“Tim is not a product person.” – Steve Jobs
The Apple Watch certainly found its way – we, the users, were the Apple Watch alpha and beta testers, collectively standing in for Steve Jobs, doing much of what the singular genius would have done before release by brute force and sheer numbers after release. It took four generations of Apple Watch, but we’re here now and we wouldn’t trade the experience for anything! The same goes for Apple Glasses! — MacDailyNews, January 31, 2020
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The post Tim Cook’s riskiest move yet: Apple’s mixed-reality headset appeared first on MacDailyNews.
