Shawdesh desk:

Apple chief executive Tim Cook says there are still “not enough women at the table” at the world’s tech firms – including his own.

In an exclusive interview with the BBC, Mr Cook said technology “will not achieve nearly what it could achieve” without a more diverse workforce.

He said there were “no good excuses” for the lack of women in the sector.

He also said he thought Augmented Reality (AR), and the concept of the Metaverse, were “profound.”

“In the future people will wonder how we lived without AR,” he says. “We’re investing a tonne in that space.”

Augmented Reality is a mixture of digital content and the real world – a very simple example might be using the phone on your camera to insert virtual furniture before you buy it, to see how it might look in your house.

The metaverse is the concept of entire virtual worlds – and big tech is investing heavily in it, not least Meta, formerly Facebook, which re-branded itself to reflect its new priority.