This morning a new extensive interview with Apple's CEO was posted wherein he provides new insight into his leadership with perhaps a hint of their coming XR Headset.

The GQ report recounted Apple’s inventions—starting with 1976’s Apple I and 1977’s Apple II, and continuing through the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch, and AirPods—have arguably done more to change the basic way that humans go through their day than those of any other company in the past 50 years. For these achievements, Jobs, who cofounded Apple and spearheaded the development of most of its signature products, is worshipped like a god, and Jonathan Ive, Apple’s erstwhile design head, is worshipped like a demigod. But it is Cook who has run the company since Jobs’s death, in 2011, Cook who has presided over the astronomical growth in the value of the stock, and Cook who is shaping the future of Apple today.

It's Cook's responsibility to protect what the company has already built while presiding over Apple’s next big thing. Lately, rumor has coalesced around that thing being a headset, perhaps called the Reality Pro, with capabilities for virtual and augmented reality.

Rumors suggests this headset is imminent. (Cook will not, to be clear, confirm or deny the existence of such a thing to a journalist, though he will happily talk about the…*potential…*of such a device.)

It is easier to forget now, but at the time Cook succeeded Jobs, much was made of their differences. Cook had already been with Apple for 13 years, but he’d worked in operations, where he’d been single-mindedly focused on the details of supply chains and factory management and procuring materials and squeezing every last ounce of efficiency out of the system that produced Apple’s inventions. What he was not known for was being in the room when those inventions were discovered. In his later years at Apple, Jobs took multiple reported leaves of health, leaving Cook in charge each time. But, to many, Cook remained a systems expert, an operational tactician—an adult who could be trusted to keep things running until Jobs would come back. Then, suddenly, Jobs was not coming back, and Cook was being asked to replace him.

Even as Cook has reshaped Apple’s business and grown the company into an even more fearsome juggernaut than it was in Jobs’s day, he is reluctant to supply his own list of creative achievements, which include overseeing not just a decade’s worth of improvements and refinements to the iPhone and the rest of Apple’s preexisting product line, but also the Apple Watch, designed under Ive and launched during Cook’s tenure, and the AirPods, a staple of pandemic and post-pandemic life. “We don’t really look back very much at all in history,” Cook says. “We’re always focused on the future and trying to feel like that we’re very much sort of at that starting line where you can really dream and have big ideas that are not constrained by the past in some kind of way.”

And the future is…complicated. Today, Apple is both the dominant tech company on the planet, having emerged from the pandemic not just relatively unscathed but more prosperous than ever, and also at a crossroads: perpetually on the brink of the discovery that will change our lives again, while at the same time fending off constant challenges to its existing business. In his tenure, Cook has helped pivot the company toward services, like Apple TV+, which have provided new revenue but also new competition. Regulators here and abroad are scrutinizing the company closely over how it manages its App Store. And all the while, there is a whole giant future out there—self-driving cars, virtual and augmented reality, one more thing after one more thing—as yet unconquered, and many contenders, some of them just miles from Apple Park, vying to get there before Apple does. To manage all this takes a type of inventiveness not usually associated with people of Cook’s operations training.

Zack Baron, GQ writer and interviewer asked Cook "if the fact that neither Google Glass nor, more recently, Meta’s Quest have made much of a dent in the marketplace might make him wary of attempting to try to manufacture something in that same space. He pauses, and then steers the conversation back to Apple’s own history of success in areas where people might have doubted its chances. 'Pretty much everything we’ve ever done, there were loads of skeptics with it,' Cook says. 'If you do something that’s on the edge, it will always have skeptics.' Cook says when Apple decides to enter a market, he asks himself the following questions: 'Can we make a significant contribution, in some kind of way, something that other people are not doing? Can we own the primary technology? I’m not interested in putting together pieces of somebody else’s stuff. Because we want to control the primary technology. Because we know that’s how you innovate.'

This is a really deep interview with Apple's CEO and you could read the whole GQ article with additional photos here.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman doubled down on Apple introducing their XR Headset OS at the company's WWDC23 event scheduled for June in his Sunday Power On newsletter.

Last week Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo seemed to misunderstand that the rumors were that Apple was likely to introduce their XR Headset and OS for developers - not ship it. Kuo stated that Apple pushed back mass production till mid 3Q23, which was likely the time frame to begin with. Kuo stated that "because Apple isn't very optimistic about the AR/MR headset," that assembly would be pushed back. It was definitely a negative tweet and one completely out of character for Kuo.