Tim Cook Seems as Confused as the Rest of Us Are About Meta’s Plans ⇥ futurism.com

Frank Landymore, Futurism:

Basically, Zuckerberg and his vanity project have been taking hits left and right online, getting relentlessly roasted and memed while failing to produce a convincing product. And lately, the metaverse has been catching strays from big names in the space, this time from Apple CEO Tim Cook.

“I always think it’s important that people understand what something is,” Cook told the Dutch publication Bright last week, via Google Translate. “And I’m really not sure the average person can tell you what the metaverse is.”

Cook sounds excited by the potential for augmented reality. I am skeptical; the most compelling use case I have seen is of a projection mapped story of dinner, and that is not really augmented reality in the vein I imagine Cook or Zuckerberg are envisioning it.

It seems like Meta is bored and out of ideas. Its strategy after the success of Facebook has largely been to copy or acquire, and it has done so with aplomb. But its attempts to duplicate TikTok have been received poorly, and it is clear there is a long road ahead for its augmented reality ambitions. Apple has clearly been laying the groundwork for its own entry into the space. I have my doubts about any company’s success for a brand new technology, but I wonder if Meta’s long-term strategy has been to build enough of a foundation to copy whatever Apple eventually releases. Again, I have zero idea of what it is or if it will be any good. But maybe Meta looked at Apple’s track record and realized it did not need to invent much of anything — it just needed to wait long enough for someone else to do the hard conceptual work. If I gambled, I would bet Meta’s augmented reality products more closely resemble Apple’s in the months and years following the latter’s debut.