The opinion of Mark Zuckerberg is different. The CEO of Meta said earlier this year that the company and Apple are engaged in a “very profound, philosophical struggle” to create the metaverse. Zuckerberg compared Apple’s closed strategy with Meta’s more open development, saying: “This is a competition of philosophies and ideas, where they believe that by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating that they provide a better consumer experience.”
Cook stated to the Dutch journal Bright, “I always think it’s crucial that people grasp what something is” (via Google Translate). And I’m not sure if the typical individual could define the metaverse. In other words, Cook isn’t prepared to assert that Apple is working toward any purported “metaverse,” despite frequent rumors of the company’s interest in developing a variety of AR and VR technology.
Cook also expressed doubt about people’s desire to engage in prolonged VR usage in the future. “With virtual reality, you can fully immerse oneself. And that may be put to good use. However, I don’t believe you want to live that way for the rest of your life, he told Bright. “VR is for set periods, but not a way to communicate well.”
The opinion of Mark Zuckerberg is different. The CEO of Meta said earlier this year that the company and Apple are engaged in a “very profound, philosophical struggle” to create the metaverse. Zuckerberg compared Apple’s closed strategy with Meta’s more open development, saying: “This is a competition of philosophies and ideas, where they believe that by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating that they provide a better consumer experience.”
ook’s comments make him the latest high profile CEO to express skepticism about the metaverse. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel told The Guardian that the company avoids using the term because it’s “pretty ambiguous and hypothetical,” and that if you were to ask a room of people to define it, all their definitions would be ”totally different.” Meanwhile Amazon’s head of devices David Limp recent said that if he asked a “few hundred people what they thought the metaverse was, we’d get 205 different answers” and that there’s no “common definition” of the term.
Although Cook, Spiegel, and Limp all expressed public skepticism of the word “metaverse,” it has been claimed that Apple, Snap, and Amazon are all making varied degrees of investments in technology that is similar to that which Meta believes will someday power its metaverse future. Cook is a huge supporter of augmented reality, and Apple may reveal a hybrid VR/AR headset as early as 2023. Snap, meantime, debuted its first set of AR glasses as a limited beta last year and claims that millions of people now use the app to interact with AR. Over the years, Amazon has produced a number of augmented reality applications, and it is rumored that the company is working on at least one augmented reality gadget.
After purchasing Oculus in 2014, Meta, on the other hand, has already produced a number of virtual reality headsets. The first set of augmented reality glasses is anticipated to be made accessible in 2024, however initially, only developers will have access to them.
