If I could interview Tim Cook, something I suspect will happen when frogs grow hair, I would ask him what he does when he arrives at his big house in exclusive Californian Palo Alto. It is known about the CEO of Apple that he had a partner and now no longer, and that he does not have children but does have a nephew whom he has financed his university studies. The first is an important fact in this article (later the reader will understand why). The second, not so much; It does serve us, however, to remind us that the Silicon Valley elite openly acknowledges having raised their children without screens and without cell phones. For the newspaper library, and reflection, remains the phrase to ‘The New York Times’ by Chris Anderson, former director of the magazine ‘Wired’, regarding this parenting style in which the digital gods agree: “On the scale between the candy and crack, this [mobile] is closer to crackâ€.
One wonders if Cook, when he gets home, takes off his shoes, goes to the living room and once on the sofa puts on the new Apple Vision Pro glasses and, wow, to experiment with mixed reality, that incomprehensible concept for laymen in the matter and which means that tasks and apps start to occupy the physical space of the reality that surrounds us. Everything your eyes see, your ears hear, and your fingers touch is inside the viewfinder. A computer, mobile phone, TV, and I don’t know how many other things, tucked into glasses with twelve cameras and lots of pixels.
It is hard to imagine Tim Cook doing what his company is now inviting us to do to expand his million-dollar business and strengthen the financial ‘core’. That is to say, put on some ‘trunk goggles’, very similar to diving or ski goggles, only that a cable hangs from them. Technologically, it seems that they are the bomb. With them on, you can watch ‘Minority Report’ and, at the same time, feel like Tom Cruise. Move your fingers on an open keyboard with which you will open and combine different widgets and apps. Answer FaceTime calls. Relive in 3D moments that you have photographed… Everyday things will continue to happen around you, life, which you can choose to observe or not by adjusting the opacity of the viewfinder.
All in real time. Everything at once.
In that mixed reality. In other words, out of real reality.
The bomb? Sure? Do we need that?
Call me technophobe, no but wow. These glasses – which are glasses even though Apple calls them a “space computer†– are scary. Those of the apple company want to turn them into a consumption habit. I doubt that they will succeed, especially if they continue to cost the indecent price of $3,500 (in euros and in the European market, more). Sorry, I almost wish this device would fail. Its success would mean that we are all more burriciegos every day.
The more burriciegos, the fewer people. Goodbye to rubbing, to affection, to sharing popcorn.
Here I link up with the initial question of whether Tim Cook has a partner to sit on the sofa with and thus, in slippers, isolate each other and enter their own world, while trying not to step on the wire of their glasses.