This is a rare episode in Apple's history.

According to the Financial Times, Apple's MR device may be unveiled at WWDC, a global developer conference, in June. Unusually, Apple's design and operations teams disagreed on the timing of the release, but this time, Cook sided with the operations team.

MR's engineering team wanted to make the device lighter before releasing it, and it took a few more years to do so, while the team led by COO Jeff Williams believed that the time was right for a release and Cook was not willing to delay it any further.

Apple never rushes to release a product when the design team doesn't think it's mature, let alone a heavy new product representing the next generation of platforms, but the upcoming MR headset will break that tradition.

In the past, Apple's product design team had absolute say. But things have changed, and market considerations prevailed when the global economy was sluggish and iPhones were unable to impress users.

The stock price also proved the attitude of investors. Apple shares rose 3% in response to the news.

The age of refinement is over, and in a time of stagnant technological innovation, a pioneering product, even if not mature enough, is enough to inject fresh blood into the industry and even lead the way.

Apple needs MR, and the MR market has been waiting for Apple for too long.

The ill-fated MR headset

From the perspective of Apple's pricing and shipping expectations, this won't be a product that's within reach of the average person like the iPhone.

According to foreign media reports, the product will be priced at $3,000, and the first-year shipments are expected to be 1 million units. In contrast, the iPhone first generation sold 1 million units in 3 months of release.

Apple's MR price in the industry can be said to be extremely high, is Meta high-end products Meta Quest Pro helmet price of three times.

In any case, the release itself is the most important, Apple wants to prove its leadership position in this way.

From the decision made by Cook, you can also see that Apple has some gambling implications this time. Before this, the market has been speculating whether Apple is doing MR or AR, and this question seems to have an answer.

Apple's design team had given a proposal to first release a VR device to buy time, and then step up research and development until it can bring down the weight. But Cook did not accept this proposal, but to step in place, directly released MR devices.

According to foreign media reports, Apple's device includes a belt-like battery, the shape will be close to the ski glasses, while there will be a screen showing the user's expression, so that users can interact with the outside world.

Apple's operations team positioned this product as a "first generation" (version one) with fairly limited functionality. Users can watch immersive 3D videos, interactive fitness or more realistic video chats.

Since the beginning of development in 2016, Apple has repeatedly delayed the release. The industry has also seen too many failures, with Meta, the biggest benchmark, "all in" to VR, losing nearly half of its share price in a year, and Meta's meta-universe division losing money and laying off staff, with little improvement in shipments. In China, the performance of the big companies claiming to do VR each stagnated. More startups have long been quietly dying on the road.

The biggest difference between Apple and them is that it has an absolutely stable bottom line. iPhone, MacBook, iPad and software services will continue to provide cash flow, and Apple is so much stronger than Meta, which relies on Internet advertising business. If anyone can walk in the dark without fear until they figure out the path, it is only Apple.

Rushing to the top

As a forward-thinking leader, Cook knew better than anyone that Apple had to find its next platform.

And his urgency was accelerated by the weakness of the cell phone market, with global smartphone shipments hitting a nine-year low in 2022, making it difficult even for Apple to find too many bright spots.

On March 7, the new yellow colorway of iPhone 14 was launched and just went on sale in the scalpers market broke. It's hard to replicate the hard-to-find past.

The development of Apple's MR devices has not been smooth and has cost a lot of money and manpower, and Apple has been acquiring related companies since 2013, with acquisitions occurring almost every year since then. The most recent was Apple's acquisition of VR sports content company NextVR and VR animation company Space in 2020.

However, the MR headset launch has been repeatedly delayed. By 2019, the head of the development team, Avi Bar-Zeev, left the company, and at one point there was talk of Apple suspending AR/VR development.

As recently as February this year, long-time Apple tracking analyst Ming-Chi Kuo also released a report saying that Apple would postpone the release of MR devices because of blocked software development and that shipments would not exceed 500,000 units in 2023.

In fact, when it was rumored in 2019 that Apple's AR team was disbanded, there was the problem of not being able to do light weight. This is also a key bottleneck that the entire industry has failed to break through. Apparently, three years have passed, and Apple still has not solved the trouble well.

In the past, the designer team had an extremely high voice within Apple. Releasing a product early despite the concerns of the design team used to be an unthinkable thing. But since the departure of Apple's chief design officer John Ive in 2019, the design team's status has declined and the reporting superior has become COO Jeff Williams.

Apple is experiencing personnel turmoil internally . Since the second half of 2022, Apple has seen the departure of more than a dozen executives, many of whom have reached the VP level, including chief product designer Evans Hankey, while many grassroots industrial designers have also left for Ive's new company.

In addition to the wave of internal executive departures, the overall consumer environment is not optimistic. According to Apple's report for the first fiscal quarter of 2023, iPhone sales fell 8% year-over-year and the company's net profit fell 13% year-over-year.

After seven years of research and development, Apple's patience for the development of a new generation of platforms has reached a tipping point. According to a former Apple engineer, the R&D team is under tremendous "pressure to ship" (huge pressure to ship).

This obviously will not be a finished product. However, Apple can't afford to wait. Even if it's an experimental product so expensive that few people can buy it, they have to prove they're not missing out on the XR.

After 12 years of Cook at the helm, iPhone market share has skyrocketed and products like AirPods have emerged to take the world by storm. MR headwear is not yet mature in the eyes of the design team, and no one can predict whether it will become Apple Lisa, a computer that only sold 100,000 units, or whether it will become an iPhone and become AirPods.