Apple's Tim Cook Latest CEO To Question the 'Metaverse' (theverge.com) 91
While Meta funnels billions into CEO Mark Zuckerberg's pitch for the metaverse, Apple CEO Tim Cook thinks most people couldn't even define the metaverse, let alone spend long periods of time living their lives inside of it. From a report: "I always think it's important that people understand what something is," Cook told Dutch publication Bright (via Google Translate). "And I'm really not sure the average person can tell you what the metaverse is." In other words, despite persistent reports of Apple's interest in building all manner of AR and VR hardware, Cook isn't ready to claim that the company is working towards any so-called "metaverse." Mark Zuckerberg has a different view. Earlier this year, the Meta CEO told his employees that the company is in a "very deep, philosophical competition" with Apple to build the metaverse. "This is a competition of philosophies and ideas, where they believe that by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating that they build a better consumer experience," Zuckerberg said, contrasting what he says is Apple's closed approach with Meta's more interoperable development.
Sounds like⦠(Score:3, Insightful)
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æmetaverse could legit bankrupt facebook. The way I understand it I would much rather have valve or nintendo at the helm of such a project.
I hope you are not trying to make "bankrupt facebook" a bad thing.
I actually agree with you on the second part. As a content creator in Second Life I wouldn't mind another place to build in. If it wasn't owned by Facebook, or attached to Facebook in any way. As it is I can speak for a bunch of SL creators in that we will not be touching this suckerbueg creation with 10m mesh pole.
Re:Sounds like⦠(Score:4, Insightful)
Rather than looking for your preferred for-profit entity to dominate the market, it makes sense to advocate for open standards and interoperability, not unlike the web.
We used to describe websites like they were places you were visiting. Geocities really took to that. Rather than use your username, the site had you claim a lot in a neighborhood. You were supposed to think of your web address like a physical address. You might be in area51/1234. If anyone remembers VRML, that's was the hope back then. Being able to move from one virtual space to another, like clicking a link, but in VR. This is more possible that it's ever been, we just need the right standards.
VRML wasn't half bad. It might just be the right time to bring it back.
Re:Sounds like (Score:3)
Facebook, as we know it, is already on the way out. It's primarily old people now, as young people are largely going elsewhere, and when "the Facebook generation" starts dying off, that will be it.
As if that wasn't bad enough, worldwide awakening to issues around data privacy has spurred many new regulatory laws that severely hamper their business model. And that is in addition to all the hot water they are in already!
The model is doomed and the customer base is dying. The Zuk is trying to use that mount
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I don't think Zuck has any idea what he's doing. But he did a pretty good job turning a college dating site into billions of dollars*, so he'll be all right even as Facebook falls flat on its face.
*Regardless of whether he's actually skilled, just lucky, an amoral thief, or some combination of the three - that is left as an exercise to the reader.
Re: Sounds like (Score:2)
For old people read anyone over 30 for some kid like you , right? Which given average life expectancy and using your logic facebook has a good 40 years ahead of it yet.
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It turns out [ecwid.com] that the Facebook user demographics are not quite what I thought they were.
I still think Facebook is dying due to privacy issues, but maybe my thinking along these lines is a bit on the "wishful" side.
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Your right but not AS right as you thought.
The Kids are fundamentally disinterested in the platform. And you can see from that that its primarily Gen X and late Millenials that form the core audiene. And its worth remembering that Gen X is is a *small* generation. We just dont have as many of us as either the Boomers had (We've sort of caught up to within a few percent but thats due to die-off amongst the boomers) and between the millenials and zoomers we are well outnumbered.
So theres maybe 30% of the popu
Re: Sounds like (Score:2)
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LOL, yeah young people would never use Facebook. There's much better Social Media apps out there, like Instagram.
Re: Sounds like (Score:2)
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The real problem is that the level of engagement makes the 'metaverse' concept fall short for being compelling for most.
You can carve out a nice niche, like, say, VRchat does, to cater to the relatively small population for whom this is good enough.
Other than that, current VR is an gaming and video platform, which it can do quite well. There may be some decent AR applications, but again niche.
Of course, *hypothetically*, a true MetaVerse would be game changing and owning that would be insane. But that's s
Re:owning that would be insane... (Score:2)
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I give it 0.0001% chance that we would get there in the lifetime of any patent granted today. I give it 0.001% chance that a company dutifully devoted to the mission will reap any credibility of that mission in the many decades it would take before *maybe* it can happen.
The last time there was buzz around the concept was Second Life, and their prominence evaporated before even the VR turn at the concept.
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metaverse could legit bankrupt facebook.
Oh?
Go Metaverse!
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Bankrupt Facebook? Now don't get me wrong, I've never liked Facebook, even when it was fashionable. Never the less the idea that developing the metaverse could bankrupt a company with likely hundreds of billions in reserve sounds pretty silly to me.
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It's good to question it because the way I see it, it's been done before.
Remember Second Life? That thing that became so huge in the early 2000s that companies and everyone was scrambling to claim a piece of the pie, and a land full of flying penises and other things.
And yet, by 2010 it pretty much disappeared. It's apparently still around though, but mostly abandoned.
That's what I don't get - are we trying Seco
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I agree (Score:3)
I am massively skeptical of the Metaverse, and would not invest in companies that are going hard on it. I might miss an investment opportunity, but I can't risk my money on something I'm personally antithetical towards.
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The Metaverse is just like cryptocurrency. Silly pointless bullshit. The sooner you start ignoring it the sooner it will go away.
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I am massively skeptical of the Metaverse, and would not invest in companies that are going hard on it. I might miss an investment opportunity, but I can't risk my money on something I'm personally antithetical towards.
Yes, it sounds "cheesy", but not nearly literally enough. I'm advocating for the Fetaverse -- of course, embracing *all* cheeses. It should be pretty popular, especially in Wisconsin and with Green Bay Packers fans -- and they've already got the headgear [wikipedia.org].
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I like this a lot. And I'm going to steal it.
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I like this a lot. And I'm going to steal it.
No problem, just include me in the credits ... :-)
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Well, obviously it's not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturer of dairy products.
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I think it will be the Betaverse. I.e. eternal beta, bordering on vaporware.
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I think it will be the Betaverse. I.e. eternal beta, bordering on vaporware.
Still -- technically -- better than the VHSverse ... :-)
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That joke only works in the US, over here in Europe the battle was VHS vs. Video 2000.
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That joke only works in the US, over here in Europe the battle was VHS vs. Video 2000.
Thanks! I'll remember that if I ever start a comedy career featuring jokes only 5 people will get, like this cassette tape comic [pinterest.com], and take it to Europe. :-)
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Yeah, you won't find anyone under 30 to get that joke. Just like that one:
What does an internet addict and a F-18 pilot have in common? Both break out in cold sweat if their display says NO CARRIER.
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Damn, now you've done it. Now they'll make the metaverse so that one's avatar can interact with consumer product avatars in new and exciting ways...."please nod your little avatar head in payment and don't finger the moichendize" where "moichendize" is spoken the way Bugs Bunny would say it.
Now there's an idea, you could enter your very own version of Warner Bros cartoons, back when they were good. Just think, you could spend most of your life not living your life. Who wouldn't want that?
Re: I agree (Score:3)
I also agree. I have only a vague idea of what "the meta verse" is, but since Facebook is pushing it, I know I don't really have to care either.
Last thing I need is to spend more time on a fucking computer or computer-like device.
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Of three points, you have none correct.
- Not poor
- Active social life
- Average posts to slashdot, probably 5 - 6
Can we all acknowledge... (Score:2, Funny)
Can we all just acknowledge and agree that Zuck watched ReadyPlayerOne and is doing essentially a Michael Jackson/Peter Pan kinda thing here and everyone is too polite to tell him to stop.
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This is pretty much my assumption, honestly. The big problem is that, in the movie, there was a product before the announcement. There is still nothing "Oasis" like about the Metaverse. It's going to be crap without some sci-fi levels of technological advancement.
Oh, and I have no doubt that Meta would be the IOI of the story even if the product originates from within Meta.
Re: Can we all acknowledge... (Score:2)
I don't know... Seems like maybe he read Snow Crash in high school and he's trying to recreate that. I mean... he's even calling it the metaverse.
Speculation. (Score:2)
That's it. The metaverse is speculation in a futuristic idea that has not yet had a compelling enough reason or demonstration for it to be a good idea to support or invest in. Meta itself has yet to produce anything that is even near a killer app or even the idea of one.
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Facebook sells ads and user data, the social media platform is nothing more than a honeypot to attract the user data and deliver the ads.
That makes Zuckerberg an ad man. Pretty much like the guys in Mad Men, but with less sexism, drinking and smoking. Zuckerberg is quite possibly the worlds most successful ad man in all history. But it must be frustrating for him, since h
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he clearly would like to branch out into something with slightly higher real positive impact on the species, but he seems to lack the abilities.
Have you seen his eyes? He'd need to be part of the species to achieve that.
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Meta itself has yet to produce anything that is even near a killer app or even the idea of one.
Facebook / Instagram is on the decline, and Zuck knows it. He's desperate to be on the "next big thing", and if it means inventing the metaverse then so be it.
He's missed the point. No matter your personal thought of Apple, as a company they produce stuff they people want to part with large sums of cash in exchange for. Facebook / Instagram / Meta doesn't have that; heck, if I got a bill from Facebook to continue to use the service I'd delete it in a heartbeat - as opposed to what I just paid to trade my iP
Wrong Angle (Score:2)
Cook doesn't have to "question the Metaverse". Our working assumption should be that it's a stupid idea until anybody at all proves it otherwise. Not unlike most tech proposals.
The only people I ever hear a Metaverse are the "live in pods / eat bugs / drink poop-water" people because they think they need to sideline 90% of Humanity. Entertaining such ideas is folly and multiplying them is idiocy.
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Most CEOs are likely quite good at thinking about how to manipulate the financial side of a company to improve the results, or at least the reporting of the results, but beyond their position as mouthpieces through which the collective thoughts of a company can flow why should we care what they think? There are plenty of examples of CEOs lampooning new tech that are hilarious in retrospect.
Not that I think anyone wa
Like the matrix (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: Like the matrix (Score:1)
Apple is augmenting real universe (Score:2)
Apple doesn't care about the metaverse because they are focused on augmenting the world we live in with computer assisted vision.
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Other than my problems with apple owning this, I can actually see a use for Augmented reality in everyday use.
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Other than my problems with apple owning this, I can actually see a use for Augmented reality in everyday use.
The anonymous coward sibling post to yours is right. Apple doesn't own it. Microsoft got their first, with Hololens. I too can think of all kinds of uses of augmented reality if it could be made to work. There's a pretty big performance gap between what's actually possible and what's necessary to be useful.
The one thing that has become blindingly obvious over the past decade is just how much has been taken for granted about human vision and the human visual cortex. Among Tesla's flailings trying to get
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Even Apple couldn't get normal people to wear a VR headset with camera passthrough for every day use, only absolute freaks would walk around in them.
Hell even if it got miniaturized to actually see through glasses I'm not sure even Apple's brand is strong enough to get people to wear it outside some niche use cases.
Metaverse is just VRML 2.0 (Score:2)
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A lot of things died simply because they weren't technologically ready. VRML 2.0 had no purpose. Honestly the metaverse doesn't either, not yet with our current hardware and capabilities. But that isn't to say that it won't ever be useful.
What GOOD has Tim Cook done ? (Score:1)
Tim Cook seems vaguely pleasant in a male-librarian sort of way, but WHAT THE FUCK GOOD HAS HE DONE ?
For Apple, let alone the world in general ?
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Honestly I've gotten way more into the Apple ecosystem since Cook took over. The phones are better, of course, an actual paper-sized tablet is way more useful to me than the small ones Jobs focused on, and in chip design the M1 and M2 are pretty impressive. And if other companies did these things first, that was true under Jobs -- what single truly innovative product did he push that some other company didn't beat him to?
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And a larger tablet ? Really, that's it ?
Not many other companies beat Jobs to the one-button mouse.
CAUSE IT WAS A SHIT IDEA !
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He was in charge when it came out, wasn't he? It's not like Steve Jobs designed anything himself? Hell, at least Cook is an engineer rather than a narcissistic showman like Jobs.
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"WHAT THE FUCK GOOD HAS HE DONE" he took Apple off Intel chips. And he cut his teeth on honing their supply chain that brought out the iPod, iPad, and iPhone before he ever got to CEO.
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Actually, Apple was on Motorola, then IBM chips before it was on Intel...
It's already documented (Score:2)
—The Purifier
I do not get it (Score:4, Interesting)
Facebook invested, uh invested is the wrong word, blew, blew many billions on VR and their headsets are no better than startups or companies that invested a few million. I mean, look at the headsets from Pico and Varjo, they are just as good or better than the Quest 2.
Recent comments from Cook (Score:4, Insightful)
Not sure if it was in the same interview or not (and can't be bothered to read the article), but Cook recently said something to the effect that there'll be a time in the not-too-distant future where we won't even remember what it was like before AR was everywhere because it'll become so central to how we live our lives. I took that to mean that he's anticipating an inflection point with regards to AR, after which it will become ubiquitous, in much the same way that there was an inflection point in the smartphone market with the launch of the iPhone.
For my part, I'd welcome that. I mean, just imagine how transformative it could be for something like, say visiting a foreign country. You could navigate the roads and walkways with the confidence of a local; see historical details layered directly on top of monuments, art, or sites you came to visit; have restaurant menus transparently translated so that you can read them; could see posted prices translated into your home currency; and so on. A lot of this is already possible with smartphones today, but the manner in which they do so is inherently intrusive: you have to pull your phone out, pause, point it at the thing in question, pull up the app, get to the right place in the app, etc..
Mind you, our ability to do that today with smartphones is already a miracle of modern technology, but having workflows built around passive interactions in the real world would be a step above. It would be a transformative experience.
Or at least it has the potential to be. Unfortunately, we've already seen companies get this tech fundamentally wrong. See Google Glass' "glasshole" users. There are no guarantees that Apple has this figured out either. We'll just have to wait and see.
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Never mind all the extra things being added to your field of view, in today's world I'm more interested in the things that can be removed from view.
I'd pay serious money for an adblocker I can run on my glasses that blanks out billboards, posters, and attention-grabbing screens.
Tim Cook vs His Competitor's Future (Score:1)
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Metaface is a product? or a plan? Put the bong down.
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Be careful, Tim (Score:2)
Or Zuckerberg will change your Metaverse avatar to a mosquito.
Metaverse - already here? (Score:3)
These big tech titans forget that fact that the "Metaverse" in one form or another, already exists.
It may be in disparate "realms" that never meet, but they are realms none-the-less - virtual worlds, where people socialise, create, interact.
Online gaming - already there - been there for a good while.
Sure, it's a limited experience in terms of the amount of people who can join a server - but it doesn't detract from the fact, that ultimately, it's a metaverse.
Whether that was good old networked Quake or whether it's Minecraft - or a plethora, a multitude of other online games - each is a mini "MetaVerse".
There are constraints, there's limited things you can do, but you can still chat, you can jiggle your little avatar, your character, around on the screen.
It's not immersive VR, but it's STILL a virtual world.
We already have a series of virtual worlds - and in some ways, that's EXACTLY what the internet is anyway - the ability to virtually communicate, in a myriad of ways, with people across the entire globe.
It's amazing - totally amazing - and we take it fore-granted.
The entire premise from the company now called "Meta", is nothing short of monetisation of the concept of virtual worlds - and the crazy idea of a VR headset in order to achieve it.
They want total control over it. It's never going to work.
Re: Metaverse - already here? (Score:1)
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It may be in disparate "realms" that never meet, but they are realms none-the-less - virtual worlds
The fundamental point of the metaverse is to not be virtual worlds which never meet. The term is literally used in the context of overlapping worlds, be it Facebook trying to move real life into it, or Epic having artists hold concerts in a Fortnite map visited by players dressed as Marvel characters.
A disparate relam in some game without any content or connection beyond that game is not a metaverse. It's just a virtual world, one lonely planet not part of anything bigger and definitely not worthy of any "v
VR is human escapism. AR is computer intrusion (Score:1)
But we won't log in to any of Zuck's tracking software to do it.
Only gullible shiny-gadget buyers will want AR intruding into their life outside work.
But Apple has made quite a bit of money flogging overpriced gadgets to fashion victims.
I've been in the metaverse since the early 2000s (Score:2)
Doom, Quake, CSGO, etc....
Lying liars (Score:2)
While Cook may be telling the truth here, there's no reason to automatically believe the implication that Apple isn't poised to compete with Meta. And there are reasons to suspect he's not. The first is that he's the CEO of a major corporation, so he likely has strong psychopathic tendencies. The second is that everything that comes out of his mouth in public is, almost by definition, strategically aimed at giving Apple an advantage.
Of course, Zuck the suck may have been lying as well. That's the problem wi
What about Neal Stephenson? (Score:2)
Did Meta get permission from him to use the term "Metaverse"?
Re: What about Neal Stephenson? (Score:2)
Did Stephenson trademark it?
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It's copyrighted as part of Snow Crash.
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It's not possible to copyright a single word, so if that's all he has no permission is needed.
Anyone else here getting dot.com vibes? (Score:3)
A buzzword that nobody can really explain, and even those that have some kind of definition fail to explain a compelling reason why there should be a way to eventually monetize it, just a vague "but everyone will use it and something something profit"...
It's 1999 all over again. Think we'll see the bust in the superbowl halftime again?
Who's better? (Score:2)
So company A's theoretical product is better than company B's theoretical product.
Colour me Not Interested!
Game List (Score:2)
I've got so many other games to finish before giving Metaverse a try.
staring at nothing (Score:1)
Metaverse is for poets (Score:2)
I never met a verse I didn't like.
VRchat (Score:2)