Apple CEO Tim Cook explains why consumers would want a mixed-reality headset

Apple’s plunge into the so-called metaverse would offer a jolt to a flagging industry as well as serious competition to Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc.
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Creative users, the lifeblood of Apple’s business model, stand to gain the most from virtual-reality products, according to Cook.

“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,” Cook told GQ. “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 also looked inward during the far-ranging interview, explaining his persona and the challenges in succeeding the legendary Steve Jobs as Apple CEO. Jobs died in 2011.

“I always hate the word normal in a lot of ways, because what some people use to describe normal equals straight,” Cook said. “Some people would use that word in that kind of way. I don’t know — I’ve been described as a lot of things, but probably normal is not among those.”

Added Cook: “I knew I couldn’t be Steve. I don’t think anybody could be Steve. I think he was a once-in-a-hundred-years kind of individual, an original by any stretch of the imagination. And so what I had to do was to be the best version of myself.”

From the archives (October 2011): Steve Jobs: MarketWatch’s CEO of the Decade