Apple’s next big technology was absent at the iPhone 13 launch, but Tim Cook says he’s still a fan

Published

4 years ago

September 16, 2021

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Apple CEO Tim Cook attends the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 08, 2021 in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images

At Apple’s annual launch event this week, it revealed new iPhones, iPads and Apple Watches, all of which were refinements of previous models.

What Apple didn’t release, however, was a new kind of product — Apple’s “next big thing” which customers hope will be extremely cool and investors hope will drive another decade or more of Apple growth, like the iPhone did before it.

In previous years, Apple and its CEO Tim Cook have emphasized “augmented reality,” or AR, which is a term for a collection of technologies that use advanced cameras and modern chips to be able to understand where objects are in relation to the user and place computer graphics or information over a screen showing the real world.

Eventually, believers like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg say augmented reality technologies will be bundled into a headset or glasses, which could represent a sea-change for the technology industry like how the original iPhone’s touchscreen created billion-dollar companies.

But at Tuesday’s event, augmented reality technology didn’t make an appearance, except for a brief mention of one AR app that runs on iPads.

Justine Ezarik, who goes by iJustine on her popular YouTube page, brought up the lack of AR at the launch in a video interview with Cook posted after the event.

In his answer, Cook repeated some of the things he’s said about AR in the past, but continued to be very bullish on the technology, calling himself “AR fan number one.”

“I think AR is one of these very few profound technologies that we that we will look back on one day and went, how did we live our lives without it?” Cook said.

Cook said that the main uses for AR technology include education, collaboration and shopping for furniture while making sure it fits in the user’s home.

“And that’s at the early innings of AR,” Cook said. “it will only get better.”

Competitors releasing glasses

AR backers say that wearing computer glasses will be a normal, everyday experience, like using a smartphone is today.

Apple has never confirmed it is building AR headsets, despite buying several startups working on key building blocks like transparent screens built into lenses and hiring hundreds of employees to work in its Technology Development Group on the project.

Some of Apple’s closest competitors have already released headsets.

Facebook released camera-equipped Ray-Ban sunglasses this week, which the company says is a precursor to more advanced products. Microsoft has been developing a high-end headset called Hololens and has a contract with the U.S. military potentially worth billions of dollars. Google kicked off the Silicon Valley obsession with computer glasses when it released Google Glass in 2013.

The lack of AR announcements at Apple’s event is not a hint that Apple has given up on the technology. Apple’s launch events are focused on hardware and products customers can buy now — not providing clues about releases in upcoming years.

None of Apple’s new devices got AR hardware, unlike in the past few years, when some models added lidar sensors that can measure how far away an object is. The new iPhone Pro’s cameras do have improved night mode, which could be a useful feature for headsets in low-light.

So far, in public, Apple has generally treated AR as a software feature. It built tools called ARKit and RealityKit for app developers to make their own iPhone AR apps without doing hard physics like triangulating the location of the user or detecting hands and faces.

Those tools did make an appearance before Apple’s event. Users with AR-capable iPhones could download a file from Apple’s website that created a portal to a California landscape, which was the theme of Apple’s launch.

Apple’s new city navigation feature in Apple Maps.

Apple

The iPhone software launching on Monday, iOS 15, includes a mode where Apple Maps overlays walking directions onto the real world — big arrows telling the user where to go, on the iPhone’s screen — in a preview of what could be a major feature for a headset.

One challenge about these technologies is what to call them. Some people in the industry prefer the term “mixed reality,” which is less technical-sounding. The CEOs of Microsoft and Facebook, which are perhaps the most enthusiastic big companies about augmented reality, have started to talk about a “metaverse,” or a digital world overlaid on top of the real world.

Cook and Apple, for now, are sticking with “augmented reality.”

“There’s clearly different words out there. I’ll stay away from the buzzwords and for the moment just call it augmented reality,” Cook said in an interview with Time published this week.

Technology

Figure AI sued by whistleblower who warned that startup’s robots could ‘fracture a human skull’

Published

5 hours ago

November 21, 2025

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$Figure AI sued by whistleblower who warned that startup's robots could 'fracture a human skull'$

Startup Figure AI is developing general-purpose humanoid robots.

Figure AI

Figure AI, an Nvidia-backed developer of humanoid robots, was sued by the startup’s former head of product safety who alleged that he was wrongfully terminated after warning top executives that the company’s robots “were powerful enough to fracture a human skull.”

Robert Gruendel, a principal robotic safety engineer, is the plaintiff in the suit filed Friday in a federal court in the Northern District of California. Gruendel’s attorneys describe their client as a whistleblower who was fired in September, days after lodging his “most direct and documented safety complaints.”

The suit lands two months after Figure was valued at $39 billion in a funding round led by Parkway Venture Capital. That’s a 15-fold increase in valuation from early 2024, when the company raised a round from investors including Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Microsoft.

In the complaint, Gruendel’s lawyers say the plaintiff warned Figure CEO Brett Adcock and Kyle Edelberg, chief engineer, about the robot’s lethal capabilities, and said one “had already carved a ¼-inch gash into a steel refrigerator door during a malfunction.”

The complaint also says Gruendel warned company leaders not to “downgrade” a “safety road map” that he had been asked to present to two prospective investors who ended up funding the company.

Gruendel worried that a “product safety plan which contributed to their decision to invest” had been “gutted” the same month Figure closed the investment round, a move that “could be interpreted as fraudulent,” the suit says.

The plaintiff’s concerns were “treated as obstacles, not obligations,” and the company cited a “vague ‘change in business direction’ as the pretext” for his termination, according to the suit.

Gruendel is seeking economic, compensatory and punitive damages and demanding a jury trial.

Figure didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Nor did attorneys for Gruendel.

The humanoid robot market remains nascent today, with companies like Tesla and Boston Dynamics pursuing futuristic offerings, alongside Figure, while China’s Unitree Robotics is preparing for an IPO. Morgan Stanley said in a report in May that adoption is “likely to accelerate in the 2030s” and could top $5 trillion by 2050.

Read the filing here: