For Apple CEO Tim Cook, the metaverse is not a bet that can be fully trusted at the moment, because most people currently cannot define it, plus he is skeptical that people spend long periods living inside it.
“I always think it’s important for people to understand what something is. And I’m not sure the average person can tell what the metaverse is,” Cook said in an interview with Dutch outlet Bright.
The position on the part of Cook, who leads one of the most recognized technology companies worldwide, contrasts sharply with that of Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, whose commitment is very focused on this three-dimensional version of the Internet where it will be possible to access by means of immersive technologies.
The CEO of Apple also expressed his doubts regarding the time that people could spend in this virtual world, because although he pointed out that Virtual Reality technology is something interesting to implement, he does not see it as a way to spend long periods.
“(Virtual Reality) is something you can really immerse yourself in. And that can be used in a good way, but I don’t think you want to live your whole life that way. VR is for established periods, but it is not a way to communicate well”, he stated in the interview.
However, he did not rule out the possibility of participating in other innovations related to the metaverse, such as Augmented Reality. “I think it’s a deep technology that will affect everything,” he said in the interview.
It should be noted that this sentence is not a confirmation that the company is working in the metaverse in any way, nor does it confirm or deny reports that Apple is building new AR and VR hardware.
The fight between Meta and Apple for the philosophy of the metaverse
Although Cook has been skeptical of the metaverse, Zuckerberg sees Apple as his most important competition in terms of philosophy for building this digital world, and even criticized its lack of openness in late July.
And it is that Apple is not part of the group of more than 30 companies that helped formalize , whose objective is to explore various issues around the metaverse, such as the lack of interoperability in its development and how to speed up the work of organizations to define standards. of technology.
“This is a philosophy and ideas competition where they believe that by doing everything themselves and by tightly integrating, they build a better experience for the consumer,” Zuckerberg complained to his employees, according to a recording obtained by The Verge.
However, Tim Cook is not the only high-profile CEO skeptical of the metaverse. Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap, for example, avoids using this term because he still considers it “pretty old and hypothetical”, so if you asked a group of people to define it, you would get a different answer for each one.
