Needing eleven and a half years to leave behind the influence of the 'father' sounds more like psychoanalytic therapy than the management model of the largest company in the world by market value. But it's what Apple has needed to escape the shadow of Steve Jobs. Yesterday, it achieved it, at least in theory, with the presentation of its new augmented and virtual reality glasses, which will go on sale in early 2024.
From the psychological point of view, Apple receives with that product the discharge of the psychoanalyst. The reasons are simple. It is the first major device that the company puts on the market in which Steve Jobs, who died in October 2011, has not participated. True: in 2018 Apple launched the HomePod, a personal assistant, but it was a defensive and hasty move to stop Amazon's Alexa, which had become, against all odds, a success in a market that soon after stagnated.
Virtual and augmented reality glasses are something different. It is Apple's commitment to virtual reality and the metaverse popularized by Meta (the former Facebook) at the end of 2021. It's a product Apple has been investing in for years, and which it will integrate with its other devices — Macs, iPhones, and iPads — and with its huge online services division. Besides, Apple has done with the market what Freud would call "transfer", because yesterday its action, before announcing the launch, marked its record of a year, with a total capitalization of the company of 2.9 billion dollars (2.7 billion euros).
The glasses are also what a psychoanalyst would call a projection of the personality of the man who succeeded Steve Jobs, Tim Cook. According to the American media, they have been released somewhat hastily. The design, which is one of the hallmarks of Apple, has been taken care of, but without reaching the obsessive extremes of Steve Jobs and his head in that field, the British Jony Ive, who left the company in 2019.
It is, thus, Cook's attempt to emulate his 'super ego' (huge ego was not lacking, of course), Steve Jobs, a character famous for his narcissism, his mouthy character, his ability to sell his products, and his creativity. Cook is discreet, uncreative, and has an extraordinary ability to get along with the market and also with politicians, as revealed by the fact that he is a Democratic supporter who became a friend of Trump and has managed to make China account for 18% of the turnover and 85% of the manufacture of Apple products.
His main virtue is to be a genius of logistics and management, which has helped Apple, year after year, to pulverize market expectations without releasing any truly new product - cynics say that each iPhone is the same as the previous one only with a better camera - and thus present overwhelming results, that led the company to reach three billion dollars (2.8 billion euros) in value on January 3, 2022.
Cook's biggest initiative has been the development of the services unit, which already provided in the first quarter of this year a revenue of 20,900 million dollars to Apple and has led it to become, for example, one of the members of ANA (the acronym formed by Amazon, Netflix, and Aple, the three Silicon Valley companies that have 'eaten' Hollywood). The problem is that Apple is so big that that figure — bigger than Boeing's total turnover, or Coca-Cola and Netflix combined — was barely 17.8% of its total turnover.
Now, are Apple's glasses going to be a success? For now, they are very expensive. At $ 3,500 (3,270 euros) per unit, they will cost seven times more than the Quest 3 that Meta will take out in autumn. But there's another problem: It's not clear that there is a market for the metaverse.
In 2022, Meta failed to achieve half of the half a million users it expected for its Horizon Worlds virtual reality platform. An investigation by the Wall Street Journal revealed that most subscribers did not re-enter the platform after the first month. Microsoft's HoloLens system has been poorly accepted, and the contract to supply 100,000 of those headsets to the US Armed Forces for 479 million dollars (447 million euros) has been years late, plagued by technical problems.
Now, the entry of Apple, with its famous - and controversial - 'walled garden' of apps and services could perhaps break that block, and accelerate the acceptance of virtual and augmented reality in the market. Although its rivals in that market - Meta, Microsoft, Google or Sony - are among the largest and best-known companies in the world, Apple has, after all, the best image of a great company on Earth, thanks to the quality of its products and its defense of the privacy of its users (at least, in relation to other companies, as Goal). In any case, the company's forecasts suggest that virtual reality glasses will generate very little business this year and next. So Apple and Tim Cook will continue under the shadow of Steve Jobs, in the form of the iPhone, the Mac, the Apple Watch, and the iPad. Psychoanalysis, as we know, is a therapy that never ends.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Learn more