Every time I visit the Apple Park campus, my mind flashes to a tour I took months before construction was finished, when there was dust on the terrazzo floors and mud where lush vegetation now flourishes. My guide was Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. With a proprietor’s pride, he ushered me through the $5 billion circular colossus, explaining that committing to the new campus was a “100-year decision.”
Today I am returning to the Ring—pulsing with energy seven years after it opened—to see Cook again. The tech world is at an inflection point. The mightiest companies will either stumble or secure their dominance for decades. We are here to discuss Cook’s big move in this high-stakes environment: the impending release of Apple Intelligence, the company’s first significant offering in the white-hot field of generative AI. Some consider it belated. All year, Apple’s competitors have been gaining buzz, dazzling investors, and dominating the news cycle with their chatbots, while the world’s most valuable company (as I write) was showing off an expensive, bulky augmented-reality headset. Apple has to get AI right. Corporations, after all, are less likely than buildings to stand proud for a century.
Cook didn’t panic. Like his predecessor Steve Jobs, he doesn’t believe that first is best. “Classic Apple,” as he puts it, enters a cacophonous field of first-movers and, with a strong grasp of novelty versus utility, unveils products that make the latest technologies relatable and even sexy. Think back to how the iPod rethought digital music. It wasn’t the first MP3 player, but its compactness, ease of use, and integration with an online store thrilled people with a new way to consume their tunes.
Cook also contends that Apple has been preparing for the AI revolution all along. As far back as 2018, he poached Google’s top AI manager, John Giannandrea, for a rare expansion of the company’s senior vice president ranks. Then he pulled the plug on a long-running smart-car program (an open secret never publicly acknowledged by Apple) and marshaled the company’s machine-learning talent to build AI into its software products.
In June, Apple announced the results: a layer of AI for its whole product line. Cook had also brokered a deal with the gold standard in chatbots, OpenAI, so that his users could have access to ChatGPT. I’d gotten a few demos of what they were planning to reveal, including a tool to create custom emoji with verbal prompts and an easy-to-use AI picture generator called Image Playground. (I hadn’t yet tested the revivification of Siri, Apple’s lackluster AI agent.)
Perhaps what most distinguishes Apple’s AI—at least according to Apple—is its focus on privacy, a hallmark of the Cook regime. The AI tools, which are rolling out through software updates on the latest iPhone and relatively recent Macs, will largely run on the device itself—you don’t send your data to the cloud. The computation for more complicated AI tasks, Cook assures, occurs in secure regions of Apple’s data centers.
Another thing I’m reminded of on my return to the Ring is how skillful Cook is at touting the results of his big decisions, from the Apple Watch to his bet on custom silicon chips, which unleashed innovations that boost Apple phones and laptops. (And not mentioning decisions that didn’t pan out, like that multibillion-dollar smart-car project.) When he strolls into the conference room where we’re meeting, I know Cook will be meticulously cordial, displaying manners honed during his Alabama boyhood, while calmly hyperbolizing the virtues of Apple’s products and fending off criticisms of his very powerful company. (And when asked for comment on the election results, which came in after our talk, he chose to keep his views to himself.) Steve Jobs would come at a journalist like the rain in Buenaventura, aggressively pitching his message; Cook envelopes his interlocutors in a gentle mist and confides awed assessments of his company’s efforts.
The ultimate assessments, of course, will come from users. But if 40 years of covering Apple has taught me anything, it is this: Should this first iteration of AI fall short, an unrepentant Cook will show up at a future pretaped keynote hailing a new version as “the best Apple Intelligence we’ve ever built.” Despite all the pressure, Tim Cook never lets you see him sweat.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity, combining on-camera and off-camera portions. Check out WIRED’s YouTube channel for the video.
When did you first understand generative AI was going to be a very big deal?
I wouldn’t say there was an aha moment. It built like a wave, or like rolling thunder. Back in 2017 we built a neural engine into our products. It was already apparent that AI and machine learning were huge. It became obvious that we had to divert lots of people to it, that it would be a new era for our products.
How did you figure out what you’d build with it?
We wanted to innovate in such a way that things would be personal and private. We began to think about the intersection of those things in a way that was classic Apple—how do you deliver this technology so that it benefits people and enhances their lives?
In your presentations you use Apple Intelligence almost as a synonym for AI. Do you think people fear AI?
I think that does exist. We batted around names for everything and decided on Apple Intelligence. It wasn’t a pun off of artificial intelligence. In hindsight, it seems so straightforward.
Some companies charge for AI-enhanced services. Did you consider that?
We never talked about charging for it. We view it sort of like multitouch, which enabled the smartphone revolution and the modern tablet.
You’ve personally been using Apple Intelligence for a while. What has been most useful for you?
We’re an email-based company, and I get enormous numbers from users, employees, partners, and so forth. Having it summarize author responses is a game changer, and having it prioritize things for you so you’re not doing your usual triage. Then, of course, there are fun things like the Image Playground.
I’ve heard you say that Apple Intelligence could make you funnier, which seems strange.
I think it can make you friendlier, which, in many ways, can be funnier as well.
Having AI speak for people makes me wonder whether the nature of communication will degrade. If Apple Intelligence writes something funny, who’s being funny, the sender or the AI?
It’s still coming from you. It’s your thoughts and your perspective. You and I both remember the productivity that came from the advent of the personal computer. It was no longer you punching your calculator, you were doing something on a spreadsheet. It was no longer you at the typewriter, you were using a word processor. Logic Pro helps musicians create music, but they’re still the author.
One of your demos involves a fictional recent graduate applying for a job. The cover letter is colloquial and somewhat sophomoric, but with Apple Intelligence a single click changes it to look like a savvy, smart person wrote it. If I’m a recruiter who hired that person, maybe I will feel tricked if they don’t live up to the professionalism of that letter.
I don’t think so. By using the tool, it comes across as more polished. It’s still your decision to use the tool. It’s like you and I collaborating on something—one plus one can equal more than two, right?
I guess the counterargument is that back in the early days of internet search, people complained that no one bothered to memorize dates anymore: “I don’t need to. I have a search engine!” So no one has to learn history—and now, how to write a professional letter.
These worries have been around for years. I remember when people felt like the calculator would fundamentally erode people’s math ability. Did it really, or did it make something more efficient?
I used to know how to do long division. I don’t anymore.
I haven’t forgotten.
Point to you. Another thing that strikes me about Apple Intelligence is that you already had a lot of information about us from our emails, our calendars, and other Apple products. To make Apple Intelligence useful, you stitch together all that information. That’s why privacy is so critical. Not many companies can do that, because they don’t have Apple’s ecosystem.
We don’t look at it as the value of the ecosystem. It’s doing things to help people and make their lives better. And it clearly does that.
Will you open up Apple apps like Mail and Messages to other companies to use in their AI systems? How are you thinking about privacy there?
We’ll always consider the privacy implications. We don’t accept that there’s a trade-off between great privacy and great intelligence. Much of Apple Intelligence runs on the device, but for some users we need more powerful models. So we crafted private cloud compute that essentially has the same privacy and security as your device does. We just kept plugging at it until we came up with the right idea.
OK, let’s change gears a bit. Apple has been designing custom silicon to make its products more efficient and powerful. This seems to me an underappreciated part of Apple’s success in the past decade.
It’s a huge enabler. We’ve always believed that we should own the primary technologies that our products are built on. Steve talked about this. I’m not saying we’ve always done that, but we’ve always believed that, and it was always a journey to get there.
But there is one technology—world-knowledgeable large language models—that you’re outsourcing to OpenAI. When you announced the deal, it seemed framed as an initial arrangement. Is it inevitable that you will eventually build your own powerful LLMs?
I wouldn’t want to predict. We felt that OpenAI was the pioneer and was ahead. We felt that some portion of our customers would want access to world knowledge [that Apple Intelligence doesn’t provide], and we wanted to integrate it in an elegant way that still respected people’s ability to choose whether they wanted to do that or not.
I’m wondering whether there’s been a vibe shift in your relationship, even before you started using ChatGPT in your products. First Apple was going to have an observer on OpenAI’s board. Now you’re not. Recently it was rumored you were going to participate in their big investment round. You didn’t. Meanwhile, OpenAI has had some key employee departures, and the FTC is examining whether AI power is too concentrated. Has there been any cooling off?
There’s no truth behind that at all. And I would just say, our MO is not to go out and invest in a number of companies. It’s rare that we’ve ever done that. So it would be odd, an exception, for us to do that there.
So you never considered investing in OpenAI?
I’m not going to say we never looked at it. I’m just saying that it would be a rare move on our part to do that. We did ARM back in the day. Who else did we do? We did one or two others.
ARM was pretty good.
ARM was pretty good. [In 1990, Apple invested $3 million to own 30 percent of ARM—a stake that would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But more important, ARM was and is a critical chip supplier, most notably for the iPhone.]
One big difference between Apple and OpenAI is that they are obsessed with achieving AGI. You never hear that from Apple. Do you think AGI will happen?
Right now the technology is good enough where we can deliver it to people and change their lives, and that’s what we’re focused on. We’ll keep pulling the string and see where it takes us.
If AGI does actually happen, how would that affect Apple?
That’s a discussion that we’ll continue to have.
When you’re thinking about things late at night, don’t you sometimes ask what it would mean if computers had superhuman intelligence?
Oh, of course. Not just for Apple, but for the world. There’s so much extraordinary benefit for humanity. Are there some things you have to have guardrails on? Of course. We’re very deeply considerate about things that we do and don’t do. I hope that others are as well. AGI itself is a ways away, at a minimum. We’ll sort out along the way what the guardrails need to be in such an environment.
Implementing generative AI puts a lot of stress on your infrastructure, requiring more power and more data centers. Does this present extra challenges to Apple’s goal to be carbon-neutral by 2030?
More challenges, yes. But are we coming off the goal? No, definitely not. With more data centers, you use more renewable energy, and we’ve built that muscle now. Since 2015 our carbon footprint is down over half, while our net sales have gone up well over 50 percent. I feel very good about 2030.
So you won’t have to reactivate old nuclear plants or anything?
I don’t see that.
Obviously, the iPhone has had an incredible impact on our lives. We like them so much that we can’t take our eyes off them. As the person who manufactures and sells them, do you worry that these devices have made us more distractible and ruined our ability to concentrate? In an informal study recently, teachers at elite institutions complained that their students struggle to read books.
I worry about people endlessly scrolling. That’s the reason we do things like Screen Time, to try to guide people. We support people putting limits on themselves, like the number of notifications you get. We do a lot of things in the parental controls area as well. My fundamental belief is, if you’re looking at your phone more than you’re looking in somebody’s eyes, that’s a problem.
Steve Jobs instructed you not to imagine what product decisions he would make, but to do what’s best. Still, considering how much he hated buttons, did you look skyward and apologize to him for adding a button to the iPhone 16?
I don’t know what Steve would have thought. Of course, I worked with him a long time and have my own views. But what has happened is that people have been taking so many pictures and videos with the iPhone, it was important to make it simple and elegant for them. So important that it merited the camera control.
Let’s talk about your wearable display, the Vision Pro. Reports are that it hasn’t sold at the level that you folks expected. What happened?
It’s an early adopter product, for people who want tomorrow’s technology today. Those people are buying it, and the ecosystem is flourishing. The ultimate test for us is the ecosystem. I don’t know if you’re using it very much, but I’m on there all the time. I see new apps all the time.
I heard that Stevie Wonder had a demo of the Vision Pro and loved it. How did that work?
He’s a friend of Apple and it’s great to get feedback from Stevie. And of course his artistry is just unparalleled. One of the common threads running through Apple over time is that we don’t bolt on accessibility at the end of the design process. It’s embedded. So getting his feedback was key.
Meta and Snap are leading us to mixed-reality glasses that we’d wear continually. Is the bigger, heavier Vision Pro ultimately headed that way?
Yes, it’s a progression over time in terms of what happens with form factors. AR is a huge deal. With Vision Pro, we’ve progressed to what is clearly the most advanced technology we’ve ever done, and I think the most advanced technology in the world in terms of electronics problems. We’ll see where it goes.
Apple has created a lot of consumer tools for medical technology. What’s the strategy for biological metrics and prosthetics?
It’s clear to me that if you zoom out way into the future, and you look back and ask what Apple’s biggest contribution was, it will be in the health area. That’s what I really believe. When we started pulling that string with the Apple Watch, it was a cascade of events. We started with something simple, like monitoring your heart rate, and then figured out we could pick up heart signals to get to an EKG and an AFib determination. Now we are monitoring sleep apnea. I’ve gotten so many notes over time from people who would have not survived had it not been for the alert on their wrist.
Apple plans to give AirPods the ability to correct for hearing loss. I bet the makers of expensive hearing aids are freaking out.
It’s not about competing against hearing aids on the market. It’s about trying to convince people who have hearing loss to use their AirPods. The vast majority of people with hearing issues have not been diagnosed. For some people, hearing aids have a stigma, and we can counter that with AirPods. And we can have people diagnose themselves. It’s the democratization of health.
If Apple devices began using AI to analyze all that biometric data in real time, you might diagnose conditions way before a doctor could. Are you conducting experiments in that vein, to flag dangerous medical conditions?
I’m not going to announce anything today. But we have research going on. We’re pouring all of ourselves in here, and we work on things that are years in the making. We were working on hearing a long time before we got it dialed in to where we felt comfortable shipping it.
You just announced the iPhone 16. How long can this string go—will there be an iPhone 30? Won’t some AI device replace them soon?
We see the smartphone lasting a very long time. There will be more innovation. And obviously you look at the first iPhone that shipped versus the iPhone 16, they’re totally different, right?
We’re doing this interview at Apple Park, which is now seven years old. Have you been surprised by anything that couldn’t have been anticipated when it was just blueprints?
It’s promoted collaboration even more than I thought. That was a key component of the design, but there are so many places here where you just unexpectedly run into people. In the cafeteria, at the coffee bar, outside when you’re going across the pathway. Also, there’s a connection here to Steve that is incredible and very deep. We have the theater named after him and think about him all the time, but I can feel him in other spaces too.
You mention the Steve Jobs Theater, which was designed with product keynotes in mind. Now you launch products with pretaped videos. Will you ever go back to live presentations?
During Covid we learned the audience is primarily online. Very few people can fit in the theater, and we wanted to have more people engaged in the announcement itself. You can do that a lot more productively on tape than you can live because of the transitions on stage and so forth.
But don’t you miss the vibe of a live keynote?
I do miss it. I do miss it.
The DOJ and 19 states, along with the District of Columbia, filed suit against Apple this year. One assistant attorney general charged that Apple was “a self-interested monopolist.” There are also government suits against other Big Tech companies. Do you think that the public, as well as the government, has shifted its view of Apple and other Big Tech companies?
When you talk about something such as alleging some kind of conduct, you should talk about a specific company and what is the conduct, and not group things together.
Granted, everyone’s got their own lawsuit. What’s the response to the one against Apple?
It’s completely misguided as to what we have done. Our users know this. We always put ourselves in the shoes of the user and ask what is best for them, what is best for their privacy, what is best for their security. That’s the story. We’ll tell it to a judge and see how that goes.
How long do you see yourself as CEO of Apple?
I get asked that question now more than I used to.
Why is that?
As I age, as my hair turns gray. I love this place, Steven. It’s a privilege of a lifetime to be here. And I’ll do it until the voice in my head says, “It’s time,” and then I’ll go and focus on what the next chapter looks like. But it’s hard to imagine life without Apple, because my life has been wrapped up in this company since 1998. It’s the overwhelming majority of my adult life. And so I love it.
You’ve said that it’s up to others to determine your legacy, but what do you think Apple’s legacy is?
It’s up to others to determine that as well. But I think Apple will be remembered for delivering great products that changed the world, that really improved people’s lives. Our users feel it when they go into an Apple Store. They feel it when they use the products. I got so many messages when the hurricane hit in North Carolina and people discovered that they had the ability to SOS and to message people when the cellular network was down. This reminds people of why we do what we do and how much we care. That will be Apple’s legacy.
