Apple CEO Tim Cook, in the parlance of Silicon Valley slang, is apparently eating his company’s own dog food.
According to Cook, in an interview aired on this week’s “CBS Sunday Morning,” he uses the forthcoming Apple Vision Pro augmented-reality headset “on a regular basis” — and said he watched “the entire third season of ‘Ted Lasso‘ on the Vision Pro,” referring to the Emmy-winning Apple TV+ series starring Jason Sudekis.
Cook, as he said at last week’s Apple fall launch event, said the Vision Pro remains on track to ship in early 2024. At the same time, Cook acknowledged, the product is “more complex” than the iPhone, and “so it requires innovation in not only the development, but also in the manufacturing.” The Financial Times this summer reported that Apple cut production targets on the Vision Pro from an initial 1 million units to less than 400,000 because of supplier constraints.
Apple has described the Vision Pro, to be priced at a whopping $3,500 apiece, as a “spatial computing” platform, and Cook has compared the product’s coming introduction to the way iPhone introduced smartphones to millions of people. The iPhone 15 Pro models Apple introduced last week can capture spatial video that can be viewed on the AR/VR headset, according to Apple.
In the “CBS Sunday Morning” interview, Cook addressed the question of whether Apple will continue advertising on X/Twitter, the Elon Musk-owned social network, amid reports that hate speech remains prevalent on the platform and that the company is not taking action to prevent it. Musk, meanwhile, recently accused the Anti-Defamation League of “trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic” and raised the prospect that X might sue the ADL for defamation.
Cook, asked whether Apple should continue buying ads on X/Twitter, said, “It’s something we constantly ask ourselves.”
“Generally, my view is Twitter’s an important property,” Cook said. “I like the concept that it’s there for discourse and there as a town square.” But, he added, “There’s also some things about it I don’t like.”
At an investor conference in March, Musk thanked Apple and Disney as remaining two of the biggest marketers on the social network.
Cook also discussed Apple’s environmental-sustainability initiatives on “CBS Sunday Morning,” which include plans to use solar energy to power 100,000 homes in Brown County, Texas. The tech giant has set a goal for all of its products to be carbon-neutral by 2030. For its 2023 fall product launch event last week, Apple enlisted actor Octavia Spencer for a video bit in which she portrayed Mother Nature — grilling Cook and other execs about Apple’s environmental pledges.
