Inside the making of the Apple Vision Pro

CEO Tim Cook pictured for the first time wearing the Apple Vision Pro, in his Cupertino, California office. (Photo: Norman Jean Roy, cropped)
In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Apple CEO Tim Cook is pictured for the first time wearing the Apple Vision Pro and he discusses the road Apple took to get to the new spatial computer.
Nick Bilton for Vanity Fair:
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he first time Tim Cook experienced the Apple Vision Pro, it wasn’t called the Apple Vision Pro. It was years ago; maybe six, seven, or even eight. Before the company built Apple Park… 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…
Mike Rockwell, vice president of Apple’s Vision Products Group, is there when Cook enters and sees it. It’s like a “monster,” Cook tells me. “An apparatus.” Cook’s told to take a seat, and this massive, monstrous machine is placed around his face. It’s crude, like a giant box, and it’s got screens in it, half a dozen of them layered on top of each other, and cameras sticking out like whiskers. “You weren’t really wearing it at that time,” he tells me. “It wasn’t wearable by any means of the imagination.” And it’s whirring, with big fans—a steady, deep humming sound—on both sides of his face. And this apparatus has these wires coming out of it that sinuate all over the floor and stretch into another room, where they’re connected to a supercomputer, and then buttons are pressed and lights go on and the CPU and GPU start pulsating at billions of cycles per second and… Tim Cook is on the moon!
…With Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong of Apollo 11, he looks around and there’s the ghostly luminescence of ancient dust under a black, star-studded sky. It’s magnificent. It’s amazing. There, in the distance, is the earth. The blue dot. Where all of this magic is happening.
But Cook’s not just on the moon. He’s also in that secret room. In that secret building. And he can see Rockwell and other Apple employees, and he can see his own hands. And he knows right then and there what this all means. Like the universe is telling him something. He knows that this is the future of computing and entertainment and apps and memories, and that this crude apparatus wrapped around his head will change everything. He knows Apple has to make this thing its next product category.

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MacDailyNews Note: Three quotes from Bilton after trying the Apple Vision Pro:
• “This was as far from a VR headset as a kid’s Schwinn bicycle is from a Gulfstream G800 private jet.”
• “I left the Apple offices that day and went to a nearby coffee shop, and when I opened my laptop, a relatively new computer, it felt like a relic pulled from the rubble of a Soviet-era power plant.”
• “We’re going to the moon, and we’re going to look around at the ghostly luminescence of ancient dust under a black, star-studded sky, and we’ll just know that this is the future of computing and entertainment and apps and memories, and that this apparatus wrapped around our head will change everything.”
There’s much, much more in the full article here.
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