Apple CEO Tim Cook poses next to the new Vision Pro headsets on the company's campus in Cupertino. © Jeff Chiu/AP/dpa
Tim Cook is considered an experienced top manager who drove Apple's profits to dizzying heights over the years. Now he wants to prove that he can also bring successful innovations to the market.
Cupertino - Apple CEO Tim Cook has been leading the iPhone group for almost twelve years and has since been able to increase the value of the company tenfold. Despite the enormous economic success, however, critical voices do not fall silent. Critics point out that almost all current successful products with the apple logo can still be traced back to the visions of Steve Jobs, who died in October 2011 as a result of cancer. With new computer glasses, Cook is now venturing out of the shadow of the legendary company co-founder.
At the Apple developer fair WWDC, Cook presented to the public on Monday (local time) his first data glasses called Vision Pro, with which Apple wants to establish nothing less than a new computer platform. On the one hand, the Vision Pro allows users to immerse themselves deeply in virtual reality like conventional VR glasses, but at the same time it enables them to perceive the analogue environment again and again.
Switching between worlds
The headset, which looks like futuristic ski goggles, offers users a three-dimensional user interface. With this, they can see their analogue environment and virtual reality at the same time or switch between the two worlds.
Apple calls the Vision Pro a portable environmental computer. "We believe that the Apple Vision Pro is a revolutionary product," said CEO Cook. The device will change the way people communicate and work together, he said. In the USA, the device is expected to be launched at the beginning of next year. A date for the market launch outside the US has not yet been announced.
With Apple glasses, the surroundings are captured by cameras on the housing and reproduced on displays in front of the user's eyes. The competition also proceeds according to this principle. Spread across both screens, the glasses have 23 million pixels - more than the 4K resolution of a TV for each eye.
Apple sees a possible use for the Vision Pro at work because you can display many large virtual displays in your field of vision. The Apple glasses should also be able to be used like a mobile 3D cinema and for other entertainment applications. For example, the Disney+ streaming service will be available on the Vision Pro from the start.
Idea for the mass market?
Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at market research firm Creative Strategies, said in Cupertino that she doesn't think the headset is currently intended for the mass market. Instead, Apple is initially aimed at technology enthusiasts as well as developers who will program applications for the Vision Pro. "For this target group, the 3500 US dollars that Apple wants for the first generation are not a problem either. They want the latest and the greatest. The price tag doesn't play a big role there."
However, the expert assumes that it will not remain at the comparatively high price. Even the name "Vision Pro" could be an indication that there could be a cheaper, perhaps less powerful device in the foreseeable future, a "vision without Pro," Milanesi told the dpa news agency.
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Apple is entering the market with its high-priced product at a moment when a short-lived hype surrounding the business with virtual worlds and objects has noticeably subsided. Instead, the focus is on artificial intelligence, thanks in part to the text robot ChatGPT, which can formulate sentences at the linguistic level of a human.
So far a niche business
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, in particular, continues to bet on a future in which large parts of life would take place in a digital world - the "metaverse". To emphasize this, he renamed the Facebook group "Meta". But despite billions in investment, VR glasses and virtual worlds have so far remained a niche business - bringing Meta billions in losses. The company is the market leader in VR headsets and welcomed Apple last week with the announcement of the new Meta Quest 3 model at a price of 570 euros. It will also be good at blending digital objects into the real environment, Zuckerberg said.
So far, the VR glasses business has been incomparably smaller than the smartphone market. Market researchers at IDC expect that only ten million VR and AR headsets will be sold in 2023. By comparison, over 1.2 billion smartphones were sold worldwide last year.
At the beginning of the event, new Mac computers with more powerful processors were introduced. Among them is the first model of the Mac Pro, which is aimed at professional users, with in-house chips. This completes the multi-year conversion of the model range from Intel processors to chips developed in-house. After that, innovations of the next operating systems for iPhone, iPad and Mac were presented. This includes, among other things, the ability to more easily exchange contact data between two iPhones. Dpa