Apple CEO Tim Cook wants to make health and wellness the company’s greatest legacy

Apple launched Apple Watch Series 6 with the slogan, “The future of health is on your wrist.” Which fits well with Apple CEO Tim Cook’s goal to make health and wellness the company’s greatest legacy.

Michael Roberts for Outside:

“We all know intuitively, and now with research, that physical activity is a key part of longevity and quality of life,” Cook says. His own training time is sacrosanct, the one portion of his day when he’s unreachable. “I’m off-grid for that period,” he says. “And I am religious about doing that regardless of what’s going on at the time.”

No surprise that he pays close attention to the fitness data captured by his Apple Watch. “I want to know what I’m doing, not what I think I’m doing,” he says. “Because I can always convince myself that I’m doing more than I really am. So for me, it’s a motivator.”

As we walk along a pathway winding between shrubs and dry grasses, Cook makes the case that the Watch has ushered in a new era of fitness tracking, and not just for dedicated athletes. He cites letters he’s received from users of the device claiming that it literally saved their lives by detecting early signs of heart problems. Then there’s the fact that tens of millions of people now wear a device that monitors key health metrics and allows them to anonymously share data with researchers, which many do. (Some 400,000 Watch users participated in one Stanford study.) This enables scientists, says Cook, to “democratize research by having much larger constituencies that are able to participate.

“I really believe,” he adds, “that if you zoom out to the future and then look back and ask, ‘What has Apple’s greatest contribution been?’ it will be in the health and wellness area.”

MacDailyNews Take: There’s much more in the full article here.

If you ask me what Apple’s greatest contribution to humankind was, it will be in the health care area. —

I believe, if you zoom out into the future, and you look back, and you ask the question, “What was Apple’s greatest contribution to mankind?” it will be about health. — Tim Cook, January 2019