Apple Just Blinked: Why Cupertino’s Pivot to AI Glasses Proves Meta Won the First Round
- Rich Washburn
- Oct 5
- 4 min read
You can tell Apple isn’t being run by Steve Jobs anymore.
This week, Bloomberg confirmed something that would’ve been unthinkable a decade ago: Apple is shelving the Vision Pro 2 — its mixed-reality moonshot — to go all-in on AI glasses. Not AR. Not VR. AI glasses. The very category that Meta, of all companies, quietly turned from a gimmick into a gold rush.
And that’s fascinating — because Apple doesn’t follow. They define. Or at least they used to.
Now they’re reacting to a market someone else created. And not just someone — Meta, a company Apple has spent years making life miserable for. App tracking wars. Privacy posturing. Philosophical opposition on nearly every front. And now? Apple’s literally shelving a major product line to chase the very company it’s spent a decade belittling.
This isn’t just a business pivot. It’s a cultural one. And it says something profound about what Apple’s become.
The Gear vs. The Layer
In my last piece, I wrote about how every piece of technology is really just another layer between your intent and your world. That’s the right lens here.
Meta’s not just building glasses — they’re building a thinner layer. A faster translation between what you want to do and what actually happens. Tap, speak, glance — and the world responds. It’s interface compression in real time.
Apple, on the other hand, has been busy perfecting gear. More pixels. More polish. More silicon. But they’ve forgotten the layer.
That’s what Jobs and Ive understood better than anyone. The iPod wasn’t a music player — it was a thousand songs in your pocket. The iPhone wasn’t a device — it was the internet, everywhere.
Every one of those products removed friction from the human experience.
That’s what’s missing now. Cook’s Apple builds for the data layer, not the desire layer.
Meta Set the Pace — Apple Just Realized It
Meta didn’t beat Apple with better engineering. They beat them with better instinct.
And that’s exactly the thing Jobs had — instinct. Not the kind you can quantify or spreadsheet your way into. The kind that sees what people will feel before they even know they’ll feel it. Jobs had it. Tim Cook doesn’t. He never will.
You can’t operationalize intuition. You can’t schedule inspiration on a quarterly roadmap.
The Ray-Ban Metas — lightweight, social, fun — solved a human problem Apple didn’t even admit existed. They made AI wearable. They made it ambient. And when people started actually using them — not in demo labs, but in real life — the narrative shifted.
Suddenly, “AI glasses” weren’t a sideshow; they were the next interface.
That’s when Apple blinked.
So now, Apple’s shelving Vision Pro 2 and rerouting all that talent into two new AI glasses projects:
N50: a no-display, iPhone-paired AI assistant in eyewear form.
N60: a micro-OLED display model for full AR overlays.
Both are meant to compete directly with Meta and Google’s emerging XR lines. Both are Apple saying, “Wait — don’t leave without us.”
But that’s not leadership. That’s catch-up.
Tim Cook: The Operator, Not the Oracle
Here’s the truth no one at Cupertino wants to say out loud:
Tim Cook could never have built the iPod dial.
He’s a phenomenal operator — arguably the best in the world. But vision? That’s not his gear.
Ever watch Cook on stage? The man’s 60% human. Efficient, disciplined, mechanical — but there’s no magic there. He optimizes; he doesn’t imagine. He’s the kind of guy who’d hire a brutalist architect in an era craving open, green, human spaces.
Jobs, on the other hand, saw where you wanted to be before you did. He built products that felt inevitable — as if they’d always been waiting for us to catch up.
And here’s the real kicker: even if Cook somehow did have that instinct, he doesn’t have the creative partner who could bring it to life.
Jony Ive is gone.
He’s now partnered with OpenAI — literally building the next human–machine interface alongside Sam Altman. That was Jobs’ secret weapon: a visionary and a design savant in perfect sync. The dreamer and the builder. The poet and the sculptor.
Apple doesn’t have that anymore. And without that duality — that creative tension between vision and form — they’ll never make another iPhone moment.
The Compression of Intent
Every evolution in technology has been about one thing:
reducing the distance between your intent and its execution.
The mouse compressed commands into clicks. The iPhone compressed the web into touch. AI is about to compress the entire interface into thought.
That’s the game Meta is playing — and Apple just realized it too late. This isn’t about glass or cameras or displays. It’s about building a world where cognition meets computation without friction.
Jobs and Ive lived for that kind of collapse — that moment when the technology disappears and you’re left only with the experience. Cook’s Apple builds hardware that reminds you you’re still using hardware.
And that’s the difference between invention and iteration.
Apple’s Reality Check
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: for the first time in decades, Apple is chasing a future it didn’t imagine. They’re reacting to Meta’s success, to Google’s Gemini, to Altman and Ive’s rumored AI hardware play — all while trying to retrofit Siri into something passably intelligent.
It’s not that Apple’s products are bad. They’re exquisite. But they’re starting to feel like luxury renditions of someone else’s ideas.
Apple used to remove layers. Now, it is one.
The Closing Thought
Tim Cook’s Apple will make these glasses gorgeous, functional, and profitable. But they’ll still be a response — not a revelation.
Steve Jobs would’ve asked the only question that matters: What layer between people and their world does this remove?
Until Apple starts asking that again, they’ll keep building gear while others build the future.
And if they ever want to find that answer again, they can give me a call. I say that tongue-in-cheek — but I’m not kidding.
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