A new Financial Times report claims that Apple CEO Tim Cook and COO Jeff Williams overcame objections from the design team to move ahead with the new mixed reality headset before designers believed the technology was ready. However, the report is not detailed enough to give a detailed picture of what is happening within the company.
Here’s the picture he painted: a once powerful industrial design team is losing leeway as the chief executive and other factors have led the team to report to the company’s chief operating officer rather than the top design executive.
We’ve written extensively about the phasing out of famed chief designer Jony Ive, who worked closely with former CEO Steve Jobs. However, in addition to Quince, Apple also lost Quince’s successor, Evans Hankey.
When Hankey left, Apple management either changed its mind or failed to take Hankey’s place, and the design team ended up reporting to Jeff Williams, the company’s COO – that’s according to a recent newsletter from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who often reported accurate information. about the inner workings of Apple in the past.
It says Williams and Cook dismissed them, believing it was time to move forward with the first iteration of the device. The Information published a similar story last year, but it specifically mentioned that Jony Ive was a particularly vocal voice in favor of keeping the device a small, self-contained form factor – a stark contrast to a device expected to be released this year, which some reports claimed would come with a rechargeable battery attached by a wire.
The publication writes that Cook’s desire to preserve the legacy from his tenure as CEO before his current shares are divested in 2027 is a key factor in advancing mixed reality, over the objections of some designers.
However, there may be other factors as well. For example, Cook and Williams may want to release a more specialized headset this year to generate interest from creators and developers and gain an advantage in both development resources before a more mainstream product arrives in the future. Refraining from posting these building blocks until the underlying technology reaches the ideal state for a consumer breakthrough could mean ceding the future of mixed reality to companies like Meta that are already supplying products and building an ecosystem.
According to various reports we’ve seen over the past few months, Apple is preparing to release a mixed reality headset by the end of this year. If this is indeed intended as a first attempt to attract developer interest, it might make sense to present the device and associated software platform at the company’s annual developer conference, which is likely to take place this June.