Tim Cook, Apple CEO, Is ‘Really Excited’ for Apple’s New Product ⇥ vanityfair.com

On the eve of Apple’s Vision Pro release, Vanity Fair published a preview from Nick Bilton. It is a fun, light-touch article, notable mostly for its photos of Tim Cook wearing the headset, answering a perplexing obsession.

Bilton interviewed Cook about the Vision Pro and got a glimpse into how Apple describes its origins “maybe six, seven, or even eight” years ago.¹ It is predictable, but the text I bolded in this paragraph caught me off guard:

It was at Mariani 1, a nondescript low-rise building on the edge of the old Infinite Loop campus with blacked-out windows. This place is so secret, it’s known as one of Apple’s “black ops” facilities. Nearly all of the thousands of employees who work at Apple have never set foot inside one. There are multiple layers of doors that lock behind and in front of you. But Cook is the CEO and can go anywhere. So he strolls past restricted rooms where foldable iPhones and MacBooks with retractable keyboards or transparent televisions were dreamed up. Where these devices, almost all of which will never leave this building, are stored in locked Pelican cases inside locked cupboards.

These products are certainly from Bilton’s imagination even though they are presented as though they exist. Its inclusion alongside stuff Cook apparently told him makes the piece land somewhere between fiction and documentary, in an uncanny valley of access journalism. That does not mean it is not an entertaining piece to read, though.