Popular mechanicsRyan D’Agostino caught up with Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, and discussed the Mac in the Apple Silicon era, your right to privacy, the life-changing power of wearable technology for health, and more.
Popular mechanics:
PM: Can you think of an example of some features of one of Apple’s products that when you first heard about it, you said, “Okay!”
TC: Oh, they always happen. I feel like this every day, like a kid in a candy store. We were just talking in the corridor of M2 and M1 – the history there goes back over a decade. It goes back to the genesis of the M-Chips, or A-Chips, of the iPhone and upon entering and discovering, how do you insert a powerful chip into something so small and not let it heat up and burn?
We found ourselves with a similar problem for laptops: how does something that is the world’s most powerful computer chip fit in? From there M1 was born, and now we have taken it further with M2. And now the Mac is a completely different product than it used to be.
PM: How do you consider the responsibility that comes with the delivery of the device that provides the app?
TC: We firmly believe that privacy is a fundamental human right. And our philosophy is to make the decision to share information with the user.
To be in the app store you must have a privacy “nutrition label” that says what data you are collecting and what you are doing with it. You must have a pop-up dialog asking the user if they want to be monitored on other apps. This is called application tracking transparency. We wanted to give the user back control of all of this.
I think privacy is one of the most consequential issues of this century. It’s so big. I don’t really like regulation because I care about what it does to innovation, but this problem is so big that I think regulation is needed. I hope the United States passes a federal privacy law because people should own their data. They should decide who can see the data, hold the data, sell the data. It should be their decision, not a company’s decision.
PM: You’re talking about inheritance. How often do you think of Steve Jobs when you look at what Apple is doing?
TC: I think about him a lot. I really miss. He always stopped in my office while he went out. And there has never been a substitute for that. We exchanged tidbits that day and talked about the future. And we try to carry on the mission he has set in place, to build the best products in the world that enrich people’s lives. And that hasn’t changed. Many things change over time. But the reason for our being is the same.
MacDailyNews takes: A little more privacy, straight from the horse’s mouth:
Privacy means that people know what they are signing up for, in plain English over and over. I believe people are smart and some people want to share more data than other people. Ask him. Ask them every time. Get them to tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of asking them. Let them know exactly what you will do with their data. – Steve Jobs
Help us support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support ours independent technology blog. Thank you!
Buy the Apple Store on Amazon.