Apple CEO Tim Cook on why consumers may want a mixed reality HMD

Apple has reportedly been working on the development of a mixed reality headset which incorporates elements of augmented reality in addition to virtual reality, as opposed to focusing solely on VR. Apple is rumored to have plans to debut its mixed reality HMD later this spring at or ahead of its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC23) in June.

While Apple is still keeping quiet on its potential mixed reality HMD, CEO Tim Cook recently opened up on the topic of why consumers would be interested in buying a product like this in an interview with GQ. To this, Cook replied that, “The idea that you could overlay the physical world with things from the digital world could greatly enhance people’s communication, people’s connection.”

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.

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.

Cook is then asked about statements he made several years ago in which he told The New Yorker’s Ian Parker he was skeptical of the creation of augmented reality glasses. “We always thought that glasses were not a smart move,” Cook said at the time, “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 always believed.”

Cook even went so far as to say that “we always thought it would flop, and, you know, so far it has.” In the interview with GQ though, Cook laughed at this and pointed out that his thinking always evolves before pointing to a lesson taught to him by Steve Jobs.

The full interview between Apple CEO Tim Cook and GQ is an interesting one, and delves into other interesting topics from tools like Screen Time to help encourage people put their phones down, to Cook’s announcement back in January that he’d be taking a 40 percent pay cut at his own request. To explore these subjects in addition to Cook’s thoughts on the mixed reality space, be sure to read through the full interview from GQ.

Also catch up on some of our previous coverage, including how Apple is rumored to have plans to unveil a VR headset this spring, and how Apple reportedly delayed its AR glasses in favor of mixed-reality HMD.