On a speedy visit to London, Apple CEO Tim Cook checked in with three app developers before sitting down to talk to me about where the company is going.
Cook was as effortlessly charismatic as ever, putting the developers at their ease and then answering every question I threw at him with intelligent and thoughtful answers.
He even talked about artificial intelligence, something the company has been relatively quiet about in the past. I asked him about this reticence, comparing it to other companies that never shut up about AI. Does that mean Apple isn’t getting involved with it?
“We use AI in our products today fairly pervasively,” Cook said. “If you think about the Watch, it's a part of AI that detects whether a fall occurs. It's AI that detects AFib, it's AI that detects a crash. If you're typing, it's AI that's predicting the next word. And so, there's great uses of AI all over the place. We don't label it as such. We label it as the consumer benefit of fall detection or an ECG or AFib detection, not ‘powered by AI’ or whatever.”
Cook has previously talked about how technology is intrinsically neither good nor bad. So, how does he feel about generative AI? Surprisingly, since it’s not something Apple talks about, it’s nothing new in Cupertino.
“We've been working on generative AI for years and have done a lot of research,” Cook said. “And we're going to approach it really thoughtfully and think about it deeply, because we're fully aware of the not-good uses that it can have, and the issues around bias and hallucination and so forth. You know, we've never felt an urgency to be first, we’ve always felt an urgency to be best, and that is how we go into this as well.”
The apps presented to Cook were interesting. Save Your Wardrobe, presented by Hasna Kourda, is designed to let users manage their clothes, creating a digital version of what’s in their wardrobes. This can remind you of what you own, so those unworn clothes come back into use. It also encourages repair rather than the discarding of garments and can help users access aftercare services from alterations to upcycling.
Gym Streak from Joseph Mambwe was a fitness app that manages your workout for you. Its creator believes it’s more than that, that at its core, “resilience is a superpower that is available to everyone, along with persistence and the will to keep going.” It uses augmented reality to create videos in which the animated figure demonstrating the exercises appears to be working out in your living room.
And Night Sky by Andy Weekes, demonstrated on the balcony of Apple’s Battersea Power Station offices, was a stunning app which also uses AR to make stars, planets and even the International Space Station appear onscreen as you point your iPhone at the place they are in the sky. It can send reminders and messages so you can share what you see—and even what you can’t—with friends and family. All of the developers praised Apple’s support and the power of the technology. And Andy Weekes spoke about how compelling Vision Pro is for his app, saying he was very excited about it.
“So are we,” Cook replied. “We’re seeing some incredible work in development. Getting to use it every night, Cook said he believes even more how remarkable spatial computing is.
Gaming has become increasingly important to Apple, and the latest iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max processor promise great capabilities which can be exploited for gaming purposes. At the mention of the processor, the A17 Pro, Cook was simple: “It’s wicked.”
He went on, “I think there’s significant excitement both in terms of A17 Pro and M3 on the Mac, about our role in gaming, and we’re very serious about it—this is not a hobby for us. It’s something we’re putting all of ourselves out there on. iOS is the best gaming platform that’s out there and we want to keep it the best and just keep taking it to the next level. And our silicon road map really is in a camp by itself, we think.”
That silicon could do even more, of course, if more data was sent to the cloud, but Apple wants to do more on-device. Would it ever risk sacrificing privacy to get more power? “No,” Cook said. “To us, privacy is a fundamental human right, and the atmosphere is such that people’s privacy is being challenged every day, and we think privacy is more important today than it was 10 years ago. It’s one of the most profound issues of the century. We’re not backing off.”