Apple CEO Tim Cook is the opening speaker Tuesday night (6pm PDT/9pm EDT) for AllThingsD’s D11 conference, which runs through Thursday.
We’ll add our own notes to this article as the talk progresses:
• Mossberg opens with his usual Android Tourettes: Blah, blah, blah, Android, blah, Android, blah: “Is Apple is trouble?”
• Cook: “Absolutely not.”
• Cook: “I look at [our stellar sales numbers of iPhone and iPad], and I feel pretty good. We had an unprecedented number of new products last year.”
• Cook: Apple’s stock price has been frustrating for investors and for all of us. This too is not unprecedented. $200 at end of 2007, but $75 a couple years later.
• Mossberg: You need hits. It’s been a while. Are you still that company?
• Cook: Yes, we’re still that company. We have some incredible plans that we’ve been working on for a while.
• MDN Ed.: iPhone was released 5 years, 7 months, and 19 days after iPod. iPad was released 2 years, 9 months, and 5 days after iPhone. Tim Cook has been Apple CEO for 1 year, 9 months, 5 days.
• Cook: We’ve now sold over 13 million Apple TV units. About half of those in the last year alone.
• Cook: We think a lot about the TV experience can be better
• Cook: Apple TV has been very good from learning point of view for Apple
• Mossberg: Is Hollywood holding up Apple’s next-gen move in TV?
• Cook: I don’t want to go into detail… TV continues to be an area of great interest for Apple… I don’t want to go any further on this. I don’t want to give anyone any ideas that they don’t have.
• Swisher: What would you like to see in TV? Is there a grand vision?
• Cook: There is a grand vision
• Swisher: What is you take of Google Glass?
• Cook: There are some positives in the product… The liklihood that it has broad appeals is hard to see
• Cook said wearable computing could be a profoundly interesting area. As he did last year, Cook notes he wears a Nike FuelBand, “I think Nike did a great job with this.”
• Cook: It’s an area that’s ripe for exploration… for us all getting excited about. There will be tons of companies involved. Nothing great on market yet
• Mossberg: Will Apple be one of them?
• Cook: I don’t want to answer that one.
• Cook: I think the wrist is natural [vs. eyewear]… glasses are risky from mainstream point of view
• Cook: To convince people to wear something, it has to be incredible
• Mossberg: You started the modern smartphone movement, and now you’ve seen Android swamp you in terms of units and carriers. How do that feel?
• Cook: Winning at Apple, isn’t about making the most, it’s about making the best
• Cook: look at usage, what are customers doing? 80% of tablet users on Web are iPad users.
• Mossberg: So what’s your theory? Are people buying Android products and putting them in a drawer?
• Cook: “Globally, I think there’s probably a lot of phones that are called ‘smartphones’ that… if we were labeling what they are, we might say, that’s a ‘feature phone’ and the user uses it like the old feature phones.” A lot of Android tablets aren’t very compelling, so they don’t get used like a real iPad.
• Mossberg: iPad and iPhone – when are you changing it up?
• Cook: What’s new, what’s coming, what’s next, when is it coming. I’m not going to answer those questions tonight. WWDC 2013 is in two weeks
• Swisher tries again: Talk to us about the new iOS
• Cook: Remember what it was like on Christmas Eve? (Swisher says she opened her presents on Christmas Eve, Mossberg says he’s Jewish)
• Mossberg: Is this what Jony Ive has been working on?
• Cook: Jony made major contributions to the look and feel of Apple hardware over the years; we felt he could do that for software as well
• Swisher asks about Forstall’s ouster, Cook evades; says he doesn’t want to talk about particular people.
• Cook on management style: Always asks himself, “What’s in Apple’s best interest?”
• Cook: Keeping the culture of Apple is the most important way he’s like Steve
• Mossberg asks about low-cost iPhone for emerging markets
• Cook: We haven’t made a low-cost iPhone so far. That doesn’t shut out the future. To do a phone right takes a lot of work, a lot of really detailed work
• Mossberg: What about an iPhone with a larger screen that the current iPhone 5’s 4-inch display?
• Cook: A large screen today comes with lots of tradeoffs: Battery life, color accuracy, brightness, etc.
• Cook: We believe the Retina display we ship today is the best. In a hypothetical world, where trade-offs don’t exist, screen size would be a differentiation.
• Swisher: Let’s talk about taxes
• Cook: We felt like it was an opportunity to appear at Senate hearing. Apple is not asking for tax breaks, but we think there should be comprehensive reform – revenue neutral
• Cook: Very important for us to go tell our story… For multi-nationals, the right approach is simplicity. Simplicity. Just gut the code; it is 7,500 pages None of us can read it. Apple’s tax return is over two feet high! It’s absolutely crazy
• Cook: Tim: We pay $6 billion – the highest corporate tax in the US. Apple pays more U.S. taxes than anybody. Not saying we should pay less. We understand that we may wind up paying more, but Apple would also have unlimited ability to repatriate capital.
• Cook: Apple has no special deal with the Irish government
• Cook: If everything developed in the US will be taxed here on worldwide profits – this would not be good for jobs in the US
• Cook: I hope our visit to Washington D.C. helps the reform process
• Mossberg asks about all the government agencies investigating Apple over various things in U.S. and abroad
• Cook: It comes with the territory
• Cook: Take the environment. We try to leave things better than we found them. Former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson is joining Apple. Will report directly to Cook.
• Cook: Apple owns largest solar farm and largest fuel cell generation capability of any non-energy company
• Cook: E-book case is “bizarre. We’ve done nothing wrong there. We’re going to fight. [unlike the spineless publishers – MDN Ed.]
• Swisher: Why doesn’t Apple do anything with its cash hoard? [She must have missed the news of dividends and the $60 billion in buybacks – MDN Ed.]
• Cook: This year we’ve already acquired 9 companies.
• Mossberg: Did you announce them?
• Cook: Only when we have to
• Swisher: Is Apple missing social?
• Cook: I’ve never felt like we’ve needed a social network. Facebook and Twitter are deeply integrated into iOS
• Cook: We’re not afraid of large acquisitions.
• Mossberg: Have you given any thought to a little bit less control in iOS?
• Cook: Sure we have. We think our customers pay us to make choices on their behalf. I’ve see some of these Android settings screens and I don’t think that’s what the majority of customers want – But, you’ll see us open up more
Audience Q&A
• Facebook has begin to make money in mobile ads. What about Apple?
• Cook: iAd was begun to help advertisers make money – it’s still important to devs and Apple… explains how iAds makes money for developers
• Cook: Apple developers tend to make more money than Android devs
• Should Apple open up iCloud to other platforms?
• Cook: Would Apple port an app from iOS to Android? We have no religious issue with taht. If we thought it made sense, we’d do it
• When is the right time to by a kid their first iPhone?
• Cook: Parenting is key. I like kids to learn very young, but I want that experience to be curated by the parents
• What services are coming from Apple to compete with Google, keep users on iOS?
• Cook: iMessage delivers two billion messages per day. iTunes is delivering an incredible range of content… Facetime is used tremendously… However, we’re making tons of tons of investments in services. I don’t want to announce something today but it’s something we’re very focused on
• Swisher: Did Appel bid on Waze?
• Cook: No.
• Google tries all sorts of stuff, will Apple let people dream?
• Cook: For the past 15 years, Apple has believed in the power of surprise
• Mossberg: Is Apple maps fixed to your satisfaction?
• Cook: Greatly improved, but not there yet. We screwed up on it. We’re going to fix it
• Cook: Mapping is complex… We have an enormous investment in Maps and we’ve made many, many improvements over the last several months
• Does Apple need to own content?
• Cook: I’ve never believed we needed to own content; we just need access to great content
• Lots of patent litigation, but it hasn’t really accomplished anything, has it? Samsung is now differentiated from you. What’s your end game?
• Cook: I don’t like copying. This is a values issue
• With Mac you had iLife as a differentiator. What differentiator(s) do you have for iOS?
• Cook: With tablet: Pages, GarageBand, iMovie – all top sellers
• You’ll continue to see some cool things there. Apple’s [app] contributions will be mostly in the creation space.
• And, that’s all, folks. Tim Cook shakes hands and exits stage.
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Live coverage links:
– AllThingsD
– Engadget
– TIME Magazine
– The Verge