Oliver Haslam on April 3, 2023, 6:42 pm

Apple CEO Tim Cook Teases Rumored AR/VR Headset

Apple is roundly expected to announce its first mixed reality headset during the WWDC event in June and now CEO Tim Cook appears to have teased the product in an interview with GQ.

The interview was part of a Global Creativity Awards 2023 issue that saw Cook feature on the cover. The interview looked into various aspects of Cook’s life including why Apple might enter the AR/VR space.

“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. It could empower people to achieve things they couldn’t achieve before,” said Cook.

“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.”

Cook went on, saying that being able to overlay information on the real world could make for “an even better world.”

Cook also commented on Apple’s thoughts about smart glasses, saying that they didn’t expect them to do well. And so far, they’ve been proven right.

We always thought that glasses were not a smart move, from a point of view that people would not really want to wear them. They were intrusive, instead of pushing technology to the background, as we’ve always believed. We always thought it would flop, and, you know, so far it has.

Cook then said that former CEO Steve Jobs taught him to admit that he can be wrong, something that appears to have been a driving force behind the AR/VR headset’s creation.

My thinking always evolves. Steve taught me well: 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.

If Apple does announce the AR/VR headset, thought to be called Reality Pro, it’ll be expensive. Experts expect it to cost around $3,000, making it a costly addition for anyone who wants to live in Apple’s virtual world.