Tim Cook defends Apple coming late to AI with four words

While the iPhone 16 launch was all about Apple Intelligence, many have accused the company of being very late to the AI party. Indeed, a new piece yesterday suggested that this view is shared by many inside the company.

But Apple CEO Tim Cook argues in a new interview that he doesn’t see it that way, and says that the company has taken its time with AI for the same reason it has with every innovation …

‘Not first, but best’

Cook spoke with the WSJ’s Ben Cohen.

There is one idea that encapsulates the approach to innovation that makes all of it possible—and it’s maybe the closest thing to a grand unified theory of Apple. It’s a philosophy of just four words that describe Apple’s past, present and definitely its future. Four words that help explain why this was the year the company plowed into spatial computing and artificial intelligence. During one of those epochal years when it feels like everything is about to change again, I heard them over and over, in conversation with Apple executives and Cook himself: Not first, but best. 

Cook elaborated on those four words in a lengthy interview this summer at Caffè Macs on Apple’s campus, where the steady and typically reserved CEO explained that his company’s top priority is delivering great products that enrich people’s lives.

Cook says that sometimes you can be first and best, but any time you have to choose between the two, there’s only one answer.

If we can only do one, there’s no doubt around here. If you talk to 100 people, 100 of them would tell you: It’s about being the best.

Good AI makes ‘a profound difference’

Cook famously makes a point of reading emails from customers, and told Jimmy Fallon last month that he now uses Apple Intelligence to summarize these.

“It’s changed my life,” he says. “It really has.” 

Asked how much it will change the lives of Apple customers, he has no doubt.

“Profoundly different,” he said. He puts Apple Intelligence in the same pantheon of innovative breakthroughs as the iPod’s click wheel and the iPhone’s touch interface. “I think we’ll look back and it will be one of these air pockets that happened to get you on a different technology curve,” he says. 

Apple Vision will be a slow-burn success

Cook believes the same is true of Apple Vision products. While even the CEO mostly uses it as a very expensive way to watch movies, and he admits it’s currently a niche product, he says none of Apple’s successful product lines took off overnight.

“At $3,500, it’s not a mass-market product,” Cook says. “Right now, it’s an early-adopter product. People who want to have tomorrow’s technology today—that’s who it’s for. Fortunately, there’s enough people who are in that camp that it’s exciting” […]

If you doubt the Vision Pro, you might be right. Or you might be as wrong as the skeptics who dismissed iPods and iPhones and AirPods. And from the success of the company’s iconic products, Cook learned one more thing. 

“It doesn’t occur overnight,” he says. “None of these did.”  

Photo: Apple