Apple CEO Tim Cook and COO Jeff Williams oppose design teams to develop new mixed reality headsets before designers believe the technology is ready, according to a new report in the Financial Times. Ignored your opinion. That said, the report isn’t detailed enough to give you a nuanced picture of what’s going on inside your company.
The once influential industrial design team is losing agency as executive turnover and other factors cause the team to report to the company’s operations chief rather than the top-level design executive.
We’ve written a fair amount about the gradual retirement of famed design chief Jony Ive, who was a close collaborator of former CEO Steve Jobs. also lost Evans Hankey, the successor to
When Hankey left, Apple’s management either objected to Hankey’s role or was unable to fill it, and the design team eventually reported to the company’s COO, Jeff Williams. It’s decided. About the inner workings of Apple in the past.
The Financial Times article further states that Hankey’s resignation led to another resignation within the design group. At some point, since the company first began seriously working on mixed reality headsets in 2016, a member of the design team told Cook and other Apple executives that they wanted a lighter, lighter headset. He also claims that he tried to discourage us from moving forward with technology. A practical form factor for the device existed.
Williams and Cook say they dismissed them, believing it was time to move forward with the first iteration of the device. He specifically mentioned that there was a particularly loud voice in favor of keeping it in its standalone form factor. Some reports claim it comes with a wire-attached battery pack.
In any case, the Financial Times article argued that Cook and Williams’ order to proceed was an example of a shift in power in a company where the design team previously had more say in the company’s direction. The Financial Times named two people familiar with Apple’s decision-making and a former Apple engineer, but it wasn’t clear whether the source was one of those two or another. It is unknown whether
The publication found that Cook’s desire to secure the legacy of his time as CEO before his current shares vested in 2027 was a key driver of mixed reality’s push against some designers’ objections. It is written that
That said, there may be other factors as well. For example, Cook and Williams will release a more specialized headset this year to increase interest among creators and developers and give both development resources a head start before a more mass-market product becomes available. Postponing the deployment of these building blocks until the underlying technology has reached the ideal state for consumer breakthroughs would mean that already shipping products like Meta , could mean handing over the future of mixed reality to the companies building the ecosystem.
According to various reports we’ve seen over the past few months, Apple is gearing up to release some form of mixed reality headset by the end of this year. If an early attempt to attract developer interest is indeed intended, it will debut the device and its associated software platform at the company’s annual developer conference, likely in June this year. That might make sense.
