Just as Huawei listed "car building" as a taboo topic for the company, the concept of "meta-universe" that has exploded in recent years has also been banned by Apple.
Recently, the well-known journalist Mark Gurman said: "He was very directly told that the concept of a metacosm is a "taboo topic" within Apple. This is clearly contrary to strategies such as Facebook's parent company Meta. ”
Whether it is Apple or Facebook, it undoubtedly belongs to the global pyramid of technology Internet companies, but the attitude towards the concept of "meta-universe" is diametrically opposite, one actively pandering, the other strictly prohibiting, which will inevitably make people feel confused and curious.
Obviously, if we want to understand the reasons behind this fact, we must first understand what the concept of the "metacosmology" is.
I believe that many people have seen the science fiction movie "Ready Player One", which describes a decadent boy who is idle in real life and crazy addicted to online games, but in a virtual game universe called "Oasis", he breaks through many difficulties and crises, and finally saves the whole world, while also gaining a huge fortune and a beautiful girlfriend, directly promoted to the "ultimate winner of life". In the film, VR glasses are the only way to enter the "oasis" virtual universe.
To some extent, the "oasis" in the movie is the "metaverse", a virtual digital world parallel to the real world, where everyone can have a virtual avatar in the "metaverse" and manipulate the avatar to carry out various virtual lives, communication, and so on.
As for the "metaverse" being able to suddenly explode recently, on the one hand, it is because of the combination of 5G high-speed networks, XR expansion reality, blockchain, cloud computing and many other new technologies, it can be said that without the support of these new technologies, the "metaverse" can only exist in science fiction books and movies as before.
On the other hand, the long-term spread of the new crown epidemic around the world has greatly restricted people's life outside the home, and what can you do except work and spend time online when you can't go out of the house? It has greatly promoted the growth of the online virtual space economy.
Therefore, in the past 2021, we have seen many big moves related to the meta-universe, including the "first stock of the meta-universe" Roblox stock price soared by 54% on the first day of listing, the famous Facebook directly changed its name to Meta, explicitly bet on the meta-universe, Microsoft also announced the creation of an enterprise meta-universe, the domestic ByteDance large-scale acquisition of Pico, and Baidu launched the first domestic meta-universe platform "Xiyuan" and so on.
Almost all the technology Internet companies that can be named have made moves in the "meta-universe", but only Apple has given an objection at this time. Not only that, supply chain news said that Apple will also launch its first VR headset product within this year. Judging from Apple's past product records, once it enters an industry, it will inevitably trigger a strong trend of product popularization.
Although the VR headset is the core key to the layout of the "metaverse", Apple's release of the VR headset has nothing to do with it. Apple's focus is on creating a mixed reality headset for a "boom in gaming, communication, and content consumption," rather than an "all-weather device, much less for the metaverse."
Seeing this, I can't help but think of Huawei's car. When Xiaomi, Didi and many other opponents have said that they will open "car building", Huawei has always insisted on "not personally building cars, only helping car companies build good cars", also because it is impossible to achieve complete automatic driving at this stage.
Although Huawei's car manufacturing and Apple's prohibition of hyping the "meta-universe" have nothing to do with each other, from the perspective of attitude, the two companies have an extremely cautious attitude towards new things, especially things that are too advanced and the concept is greater than the actual reality, and even refuse to follow the trend, this more calm and pragmatic attitude is obviously more beneficial to consumers, at least not at this stage, both pay the price and end up with nothing, caught in the dream bubble woven by manufacturers, and sometimes "brainwashed".