Photograph by Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo
Cook on Sept. 9 in Cupertino, Calif.
Tim
Cook was jubilant. It was Sept. 10, a day after the introduction of the
iPhone 6 and Apple Watch at the Flint Center in Cupertino, Calif., and Apple’s (AAPL)
chief executive officer couldn’t have been happier about reactions from
the audience and the media. Cook sat down for an hour-long chat with Bloomberg Businessweek’s Josh Tyrangiel and Brad Stone. The following transcript has been lightly edited.
How do you think you did at the event yesterday?Cook: I truly look at it more like how Apple did. Anybody coming out of there yesterday knows that innovation is alive and well in Cupertino. If there were any doubts, that should be put to bed. I don’t think there should have been doubts before. Certainly we
weren’t doubting ourselves. We’ve been working on these products for a long time.
With the watch, most companies—you can just tell from what’s out there in the marketplace—they just take what’s there, like a phone UI [user interface], and strap it on the wrist, and it becomes a smartwatch. And we knew that wouldn’t work. The screen is too small. It obstructs the view. And so a lot of thinking went in about how to solve that issue. And I think we have come up with a way that not only makes it usable, but it makes it brilliant.
I love operating my Apple TV from the watch. I don’t have to worry anymore about the remote falling through the cushions of the sofa.
I don’t recall seeing an Apple TV app for the watch.
There’s—I don’t think we showed this. I’ve got a little advance copy. And so it will operate your Apple TV, and you can imagine that it can control other things as well.
Lots of companies have failed to make mobile payments work in the U.S. Where does Apple Pay have an advantage?
I think we have the first mobile payment solution that can be mainstream, that people can really use. I think most of the other people that ventured into this spent all of their time on the front end thinking about how to create a business model, how to collect data, own the data, sell the data, monetize the data. They were thinking about it in those kind of terms, not in terms of why you would want to use it.
Although I have to believe that you guys considered the business model.
We only considered the business model after we had the user experience down. So we started at: What does the user want? And we think the user really doesn’t want to carry a wallet. Why do you want to do that? There’s no great joy in it. When I was young, you carried one for photos. You’d carry photos of friends or family or whatever, and you would show it off.
Well, now the truth is, you don’t carry photos in your pocket. They’re on your phone. So that part of the wallet has moved to the phone. But the credit card hasn’t. We’re all walking around with plastic. Even the solutions that are out there, you’re fumbling, you’re finding the app to open. You’re then authenticating in some way. It’s a kludge. It’s really awful.
You talked about the next chapter in Apple’s story. Describe that transition: From what to what?
The next chapter for us is about personal devices, about something that’s even more personal than what we had before. And I think the watch is a great place to start that. And it has a lot of tentacles. It has a health and fitness component that we’re really excited about. It has an intimacy in connection and communication that we’re really excited about. It has the ability to control things. I’m using Apple TV as an example, but you might use your imagination on where that can be.
Home appliances, perhaps … ?
And because you’re not searching for yet another object in your home to get to, this is an object that’s attached to you. There’s loads of things that you can do with it.
The list that we’ve come up with is really long. But frankly speaking, as we open it up for developers, it’s going to get a lot longer, because they’re going to come up with things that we haven’t even begun to think about.
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