On a recent trip to Europe, Apple (AAPL -4.24%) CEO Tim Cook spoke to Dutch online media company Bright to discuss the future of the technology. In the interview, Cook downplayed the metaverse and instead touted Apple’s focus on augmented reality (AR). Cook said that one day, we’ll all “look back and think about how we once lived without AR.”

In the meantime, nvidia (NVDA 1.53%) he spent an entire week at his biannual GTC event for tech developers, with the metaverse consuming a large chunk of the time. In fact, CEO Jensen Huang talks a lot about the metaverse and how it will shape the future.

On behalf of metaverse author Neal Stephenson, what’s going on here? These debates about what the metaverse really is and what it will do are getting silly. Not to mention it’s confusing to…