Tim Cook has been at the head of Apple since January 17, 2011, collecting the complex legacy of a genius
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Steve Jobs. Since then, the Cupertino-based company has grown a lot financially and today it sails around a capitalization of 3 trillion dollars. It’s been a terrific year for shareholders. Apple fans have appreciated increasingly beautiful and advanced products. Apparently nothing really new, at least nothing comparable to the invention of the iPhone and the app economy in 2007. Then last week Apple Vision Pro arrived. The mixed reality headset, presented at the developer conference, was defined by Tim himself Cook one of the greatest announcements ever. And it certainly is, certainly because of its history. In recent decades, Apple had earned the reputation of the company that comes later, risks less but reinvents things better than anyone else. It happened with the mobile phone, partly with earphones and the audio definitely with laptops. For the competition, that is for those who invest and experiment, it is not the best of life. Those who arrive later have more time to better study technological and design solutions that the market has not thought of. But Apple doesn’t just rewrite what others have done. Apple doesn’t work like that. As in the era of Steve Jobs and today in that of Tim Cook, their idea of āāinnovation is always projected to generate a new economy.
Apple Vision Pro does not appear to be a new headset for augmented reality. Even if apparently it looks more beautiful and more advanced than what the market from Meta to Microsoft has been able to conceive so far. It is an attempt to reinvent the personal computer. It means transforming and transferring the desktop, what is inside our computers, from work to entertainment into a completely new experience.
To date, however, there are more questions than certainties. We don’t know what it will be like to watch a movie with other people in helmets. How will you work with Vision Pro? Or does it make sense to wear a headset to your child’s party? In short, we do not know if Apple will succeed in this revolution. The is missing killer application, some observers of things tech have pointed out. To date, there is no strong idea that makes the use value of this technology immediately intuible. As instead had happened in 2007 when Steve Jobs had described the functioning of the App Store in his first iPhone.
But unlike the iPhone, the Vision Pro is a product, hardware and design innovation. The $3,500 is in this sense a reasonable price for the technology contained in the helmet. It means that developer support will be needed today more than ever. Apple already has Microsoft (productivity) and Unity (video games) on its side. There killer application can wait.
