Tim Cook Interview About AI and AVP
We are here to discuss Cook’s big move in this high-stakes environment: the impending release of Apple Intelligence, the company’s first significant offering in the white-hot field of generative AI. Some consider it belated. All year, Apple’s competitors have been gaining buzz, dazzling investors, and dominating the news cycle with their chatbots, while the world’s most valuable company (as I write) was showing off an expensive, bulky augmented-reality headset. Apple has to get AI right.
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[Apple Vision Pro is] an early adopter product, for people who want tomorrow’s technology today. Those people are buying it, and the ecosystem is flourishing. The ultimate test for us is the ecosystem. I don’t know if you’re using it very much, but I’m on there all the time. I see new apps all the time.
[…]
It’s clear to me that if you zoom out way into the future, and you look back and ask what Apple’s biggest contribution was, it will be in the health area. That’s what I really believe.
On the one hand, who could be against health? But I find it a bit disturbing that Cook focuses on an area where Apple is providing top-down, closed solutions, albeit seemingly good ones. It’s kind of the same deal with some of the newer services and Apple Intelligence stuff. Press a button to auto-generate a “personalized” Memories movie. Read the curated news in a siloed app. Ask HomePod to play songs from Apple Music but not your own library.
HyperCard this is not. The Apple I like is focused on making tools to empower users and making open platforms to empower developers (who in turn help empower users). I think of iLife, built-in scripting languages, RSS in Mail, and bundled developer tools that didn’t need a membership and permission to call certain APIs.
Apple invented the personal computer and the modern smartphone. Its platforms and their ecosystem are a multiplier for the work of hundreds of millions of people. If Cook meant health in that scientists are using Apple platforms to help cure diseases, that would be one thing, but he’s talking about stuff like using Apple Watch to tell you that you aren’t sleeping well and using AirPods to diagnose your own hearing loss. These are important but small ball. I guess the implication is that there’s much bigger stuff in the pipeline that will overshadow Apple’s pre-Cook accomplishments. I’ll believe it when I see it.
[Apple Park has] promoted collaboration even more than I thought. That was a key component of the design, but there are so many places here where you just unexpectedly run into people. In the cafeteria, at the coffee bar, outside when you’re going across the pathway.
Previously:
- The App Store Era Must End
- Apple Directly Selling Apple News Ads
- Misguided Apple Intelligence Ads
- Security Research on Private Cloud Compute
- Meta’s Orion AR Glasses
- Takeaways From the Vision Pro After 6 Months
- Beta for Apple Intelligence in Apple Mail
- Redesigned Photos App in iOS 18
- Apple Intelligence Announced
- Giving Up on Siri and HomePod
- Scripting Languages to Be Removed
- Apple Park’s Open Work Spaces
- Apple’s New Campus
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> SL: I used to know how to do long division. I don’t anymore.
> TC: I haven’t forgotten.
I'm sure he's very good at working with percentages too. Like in 30% of everything is for Apple.
Given how notoriously security and secrecy siloed Apple is, I don't really buy the whole increasing collaboration by bumping into someone else at the food trough claim.
Do you notice how Cook and other senior executives keep parroting the line about how good Apple Park (a *literal* walled garden) is? It's almost as if they're trying to establish a narrative myth.
"It's almost as if they're trying to establish a narrative myth."
Yeah, this narrative of serendipitous innovation through meeting peeople at the water cooler is total bs at any company, but at Apple doubly so.
"[Apple Vision Pro] I don’t know if you’re using it very much, but I’m on there all the time."
That explains a lot.
