Tim Cook Is Optimistic About Apple’s ‘Reality Pro’ Headset

It’s been a long and winding road for Apple’s mixed-reality AR/VR headset. However, by most accounts, we’re only weeks away from seeing the fruits of Apple’s labor, and the company’s Chief Executive seems quite enthusiastic about what’s coming.

While Apple CEO Tim Cook would never go so far as to confirm (or deny) the existence of an unannounced product like the so-called “Reality Pro,” he had much more than usual to say in a recent interview with GQ’s Zach Baron about Apple’s role and ambitions in the future of augmented and virtual reality technology.

While Cook has been obliquely commenting on Apple’s work in augmented reality for years, he’s traditionally been a bit evasive and vague about it. When asked by journalists, analysts, and others, he’ll typically offer up broad comments like “AR can be really great,” and it’s “going to change the way we use technology forever.”

In many ways, this latest interview wasn’t much different; Cook remained similarly non-committal and avoided any specific examples of products that Apple could be developing. However, he expressed a great deal more enthusiasm for what’s coming in terms of the potential and possibilities of the technology.

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.

Tim Cook

Cook spoke about how AR/VR technology could “accelerate creativity,” and help people do things in different ways. He also candidly admitted that it took him some time to come around to seeing the potential of AR/VR; in a 2015 profile by Ian Parker for The New Yorker, Cook dismissed AR glasses as “intrusive” technology that would essentially “flop.”

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.”

Tim Cook

When Baron reminded Cook of this earlier comment, he laughed and pointed to a lesson he learned from Steve Jobs about being flexible and embracing new ideas:

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.

Tim Cook

Baron pointedly asked Cook whether Apple should be “wary” of attempting to create a product similar to Google Glass or Meta’s Quest, a direct question the Apple CEO avoided by speaking instead about the company’s past successes, noting that it’s faced skeptics in “pretty much everything we’ve ever done,” and how it’s par for the course when creating products that are on the leading edge of technology.

Cook added that the only important consideration when deciding to enter a new market is whether Apple can “make a significant contribution” and do something unique and original — an attitude that’s clearly in line with the company’s early “Think Different” mantra.

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.

Tim Cook

‘Reality Pro’ Still Expected at WWDC

Although Cook’s comments can be taken as only the vaguest of hints that Apple’s even working on an AR/VR headset, much less planning to unveil it at WWDC, plenty of other evidence supports that. Cook’s enthusiasm in this recent interview adds a bit of fuel to that fire.

Despite a recent suggestion by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo that Apple could choose to delay its announcement, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman still expects it to show up at WWDC.

In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Gurman deconstructs the visual motif in Apple’s WWDC invite to suggest the curved shape hints at the Apple headset. He also notes while Apple’s press releases are typically peppered with the same kind of excessive enthusiasm, there are too many reports of the headset making an appearance for Apple to risk using language like “biggest and most exciting yet” and “very special event,” unless it actually had something “momentous” to show off.

It’s not uncommon for Apple to use that kind of hyperbole. But the company knows that everyone is anticipating this headset — including Wall Street — and it wouldn’t want to further stoke expectations if it couldn’t meet them.

Mark Gurman

As usual, the WWDC 2023 keynote is expected to be a pre-recorded affair, which will allow Apple to control the narrative and ensure that any product demonstrations go off without a hitch. While Apple typically offers hands-on time for invited members of the press to experience new products following its keynotes, even for its virtual events, it’s less clear whether it will do so for the new headset, particularly with it not expected to begin shipping until later this year.

While Gurman’s latest comments appear primarily based on educated speculation rather than information from inside sources, his take makes a lot of sense. It’s not unusual for Apple to announce significant new product advances months ahead of time, and much of Apple’s “Reality Pro” headset is going to require buy-in from developers, making its Worldwide Developers conference the ideal time to show off its next big platform.