I. By now, nearing 9am at Apple Park, he’s long since got up and absorbed himself in the morning rituals of the modern CEO: email and exercise. Tim Cook takes pride in not hiding his email address, which is readily available on the search engine of your choice. In fact, Cook says, he finds the avalanche of unsolicited emails helpful. He rises at around 5am and reads all of them. Customers tell him what they think and feel about Apple products, sometimes they tell him stories about their own lives, and this information becomes a source of inspiration. If you work for Cook, you will inevitably wake up one day, wherever you are, to find one of these emails forwarded to you.
And then, often before the sun has even risen, someone arrives to make him do what Cook describes as “things I would prefer not to do, that I could probably convince myself not to do.” (Weight training, mostly.) And then he heads here, to the corporate headquarters of the company Cook has led since 2011.
He is not a leader who is drawn to crisis or conflict, two climates his predecessor, Steve Jobs, seemed at times to thrive in. “I try not to let the urgent take over the day,” Cook says. Regular meetings, different standing engagements with different parts of the company. He likes to ask questions. “I’m curious, and I’m curious about how things work,” he says. He does this not to intimidate, though there is perhaps a standard, an expectation of those working for him, lurking there as well: “If something’s really shallow, you find that people can’t explain it very well.” Like Jobs once did, he sometimes takes meetings on the move, walking around the campus. Most days, he leaves the office at 6.30 or 7pm. The overall sensation he attempts to impart is one of normalcy, of proportion, despite the fact that most days, Apple, which employs about 165,000 people, is the most valuable company in the world. (At the time of writing, it’s worth more than £1.68 trillion; at one moment last year, that number was £2.5 trillion, a figure roughly equal to the gross domestic product of the UK.)
Apple’s inventions – starting with 1976’s Apple I and 1977’s Apple II, and continuing through the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch, and AirPods – have arguably done more to change the basic way that humans go through their day than those of any other company in the past 50 years. For these achievements, Jobs, who cofounded Apple and spearheaded the development of most of its signature products, is worshipped like a god, and Jonathan Ive, Apple’s erstwhile design head, is worshipped like a demigod. But it is Cook who has run the company since Jobs’s death, in 2011, Cook who has presided over the astronomical growth in the value of the stock, and Cook who is shaping the future of Apple today. It is his responsibility to protect what the company has already built while presiding over Apple’s next big thing. Lately, rumour has coalesced around that thing being a headset, perhaps called the Reality Pro, with capabilities for virtual and augmented reality. Rumour suggests this headset is imminent. (Cook will not, to be clear, confirm or deny the existence of such a thing to a journalist, though he will happily talk about the… potential… of such a device.) And yet Cook is, in the wealth of biographies and hagiography that has grown up around Apple since its founding, an enigma still. “He’s very hard to read,” says Eddy Cue, who has been at Apple since 1989 and now leads its services division. “If you’re looking to make your decision or your beliefs based on reading his facial expressions, you’re probably not going to be good at that. I always joke with him that he’d be a great poker player, because he’d have four aces and no one would know.”
This suits him: at a moment dense with pathological tech founders who log on daily to pontificate about the collective future of humankind, Cook does not log on all that much. He does not move fast and break things. His even calmness stands as an implicit rebuke to the chaos agents – Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and so on – who often get called to testify in Congress alongside Cook about the increasingly uncertain state of tech in the United States. In clubby Silicon Valley, where it appears at times like people are battling to be the first in line on the venture-capital-powered spaceship that will carry the Patagonia-clad elite away from the rest of us, Cook seems to side with the rest of us.
In conversation, he sometimes channels the kid from Robertsdale, Alabama, that he once was: slightly wide-eyed and a little surprised to find himself perhaps the world’s most powerful businessman, wealthy and more influential than most actual presidents. During our time together, he will go on to talk about succeeding Jobs, he will defend his record as a creative leader in his own right, and he will elaborate on how he deals with his rivals and competitors in and outside Silicon Valley. He will coach me on how to keep my phone from destroying my mind and the mind of my child. He will talk freely about the future of Apple and the inventions it is said to have coming.
But his perception of himself, despite the position he has achieved in life, remains that of an outsider: “I’ve never been described as normal,” he says. A gay man who grew up in the rural South, he has turned his comfort with discomfort into a superpower. “I always hate the word normal in a lot of ways, because what some people use to describe normal equals straight. Some people would use that word in that kind of way. I don’t know – I’ve been described as a lot of things, but probably normal is not among those.”
II. Apple Park is a place that looks like it came out of nowhere that cannot possibly have come out of nowhere. The building itself, four stories of curved glass and three underground levels that stretch for nearly a mile, has the look of a spaceship that was courteous enough to come down to Earth and land without disturbing the landscape. In the middle of the continuous loop, there is a courtyard where in the winter the orchards are skeletal but still: orchards! Vast stands of plum and apple trees. Plus thousands of oaks! Winding paths that change in elevation. California hills visible in the distance. Outside the ring are basketball courts, football pitches, volleyball courts, a fitness centre, little piles of communal bikes. When the weather is nice, you can open certain parts of the walls right up. The campus runs completely on renewable energy, powered by solar panels and biogas fuel cells, cost about £4.2 billion to build, and wears the fingerprints of each of Apple’s saints: Jobs, of course, who conceived of the rough plans before his death; Ive, who realised Jobs’s vision in collaboration with his own team at Apple and architects from Foster + Partners; and Cook himself, who was running the company by the time the thing was finished.
Apple Park is conspicuously inconspicuous; a monument to a company that purports to be sceptical of monuments. In the Apple way, it’s designed to be both beautiful and useful and unlike other things – better, even – that people have designed for the same purpose. “There’s very much an underappreciation of the power of the venue that people work in, I think,” Cook says, gesturing around the third-floor cafe we’re sitting in. “And it does lead the architecture to be these rectangular blocks” – emphasis here for the obvious distaste with which he says those two words – “on a campus. You know, we could all architect those fairly easily. You have to think at a deeper level to come up with something that promotes collaboration and openness and serenity.”
His silver hair is neatly cropped; he’s wearing a dark long-sleeve polo and slim anonymous jeans, the same general outfit in which he tends to do Apple public events. There is an Apple Watch visible on his wrist, but I never see him check it or otherwise stray from eye contact, which he maintains for the duration of our conversation. Cook is a person who uses your first name in conversation. When he walks into a public space on the Apple campus and sits down, no one scatters. Maybe over time there is a slight ebb, but that’s it. When I point this out to Cook, he seems surprised that I’m surprised. “I think generally people feel comfortable approaching me,” he says. When he speaks publicly, or to a journalist, he chooses his words carefully; rarely does his voice rise.
He has become, over time, more comfortable with the public-facing aspects of the job, which, given the size and influence of Apple, are many – another legacy of Jobs, who personally presented every new Apple product from various stages. “I clearly had to grow into it,” Cook says. “I thought that the public focus on Apple was because of Steve. And so that was my mentality taking over the CEO role, particularly without him, after his death, I thought the fixation and so forth would go. And it didn’t.”
It is easier to forget now, but at the time Cook succeeded Jobs, much was made of their differences. Cook had already been with Apple for 13 years, but he’d worked in operations, where he’d been single-mindedly focused on the details of supply chains and factory management and procuring materials and squeezing every last ounce of efficiency out of the system that produced Apple’s inventions. What he was not known for was being in the room when those inventions were discovered. In his later years at Apple, Jobs took multiple reported absences of sick leave, leaving Cook in charge each time. But, to many, Cook remained a systems expert, an operational tactician – an adult who could be trusted to keep things running until Jobs would come back. Then, suddenly, Jobs was not coming back, and Cook was being asked to replace him. If Steve Jobs was Walt Disney or Thomas Edison, who was Tim Cook? Even today, Cook is sometimes derided as “not a product guy” by the people who adore product guys, which describes much of Apple’s customer base. (To take just one example of this argument, this is the title of the New York Times tech reporter Tripp Mickle’s recent book about life at the company post-Jobs and Cook’s tenure as leader: After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul.)
Cook has had practice talking about this, being asked about Jobs and how the two men differ, about what it was like to take over. “To answer your question,” he says, “in the beginning of that life without Steve, which was six weeks after the CEO thing came up, I just felt totally gutted, totally empty.” What he realised, very quickly, he says, was that “I knew I couldn’t be Steve. I don’t think anybody could be Steve. I think he was a once-in-a-hundred-years kind of individual, an original by any stretch of the imagination. And so what I had to do was to be the best version of myself.”
But what version would that be? If pressed, Cook will disagree, politely, with the portrait painted by some that he is a spreadsheet guy, a suit running a company built by a man who disdained suits. “Steve saw this – one of the things I loved about him was he didn’t expect innovation out of just one group in the company or creativity out of one group,” Cook says. “He expected it everywhere in the company.” Including in operations, where Cook worked: “When we were running operations, we tried to be innovative in operations and creative in operations, just like we were creative elsewhere. We fundamentally had to be in order to build the products that we were designing.”
Even as Cook has reshaped Apple’s business and grown the company into an even more fearsome juggernaut than it was in Jobs’s day, he is reluctant to supply his own list of creative achievements, which include overseeing not just a decade’s worth of improvements and refinements to the iPhone and the rest of Apple’s existing product line, but also the Apple Watch, designed under Ive and launched during Cook’s tenure, and the AirPods, a staple of pandemic and post-pandemic life. “We don’t really look back very much at all in history,” Cook says. “We’re always focused on the future and trying to feel like we’re very much sort of at that starting line where you can really dream and have big ideas that are not constrained by the past in some kind of way.”
And the future is… complicated. Today, Apple is both the dominant tech company on the planet, having emerged from the pandemic not just relatively unscathed but more prosperous than ever, and also at a crossroads: perpetually on the brink of the discovery that will change our lives again, while at the same time fending off constant challenges to its existing business. In his tenure, Cook has helped pivot the company toward services, like Apple TV+, which have provided new revenue but also new competition. Regulators in several countries are scrutinising the company closely over how it manages its App Store. And all the time, there is a whole giant future out there – self-driving cars, virtual and augmented reality, one more thing after one more thing – as yet unconquered, and many contenders, some of them just miles from Apple Park, vying to get there before Apple does. To manage all this takes a type of inventiveness not usually associated with people of Cook’s operations training.
He takes pride in tuning out sceptical assessments of his creative acumen. “With my background, I am used to people being critical in some ways. I’m used to the attack. I try very hard not to take things personally that I don’t think are meant to be personal. Talking heads critiquing – this kind of stuff kind of goes through me. It has to, or I wouldn’t be able to function.” Though, I will notice, he has a keen recollection for slights and doubt: he can recount precisely what people said about the Apple Watch or the iPhone on release. “The [impact of] the watches has been profound, but you would never know that if you go back and read the press from the launch,” he says. “By the same token, think about the iPhone. When the iPhone came out, people said, ‘This isn’t going to work. It doesn’t have a physical keyboard. Everybody wants a physical keyboard.’” Et cetera. Cook’s mildness of manner can sometimes conceal a person who is not particularly mild. “He is deceptive because he’s not what politicians tend to be,” says Lisa Jackson, the former head of the US’s Environmental Protection Agency who is now Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives. “He’s not loud. He’s not trying to suck up all the oxygen in the room. But there’s never a question as to his leadership.”
Over time, he has developed strategies to relax his mind and let things go through him. For instance, just look around. Cook says all the glass that surrounds us, here in the cafe we’re talking in, makes him feel like he’s outside, even when he’s inside. “I always think about hiking and the things that really settle my mind when I’m here,” he says. After leaving Alabama, he lived for a time in North Carolina, and then Colorado, and fell in love with nature. “The outdoors were always accessible there, other than some infrequent snowstorm or something,” he says. Later, walking across the courtyard, the land around us restored to some approximation of pre-Silicon Valley splendour, he elaborates: “I started cycling and hiking, and then I moved to California and it’s like, you can hike so many different places here. It’s almost a sin not to go out and enjoy it.” Being out in nature is a “palate cleanser for the mind.” Actually, it’s even more than that, Cook says, casting aside his measured nature for a moment. “It’s better than any other thing you can possibly do!”
III. It’s a remarkable story. Remarkable enough that if you’d sat down young Tim Cook and told it to him, he wouldn’t have believed you. The reaction “would’ve been disbelief,” he says. He was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1960, and grew up in Robertsdale, where his father worked in a shipyard. Robertsdale was far from everything. Something like Cook’s current position – “the imagination wasn’t big enough to dream it,” Cook says. Robertsdale was the place that set the template for the way Cook still seems to see himself today, which is as fundamentally different. “When I was growing up,” he says, “there was no internet, and therefore you didn’t find a lot of people like you around.”
He went to Auburn University, studied industrial engineering, fell in love with the football team and the Rolling Stones. Then he went to IBM and, in time, revolutionised its supply chain by doing what he’d later do at a company called Intelligent Electronics, and then at Compaq, and then at Apple itself – helping source materials from around the world and cutting the time each company kept parts before assembling them into computers.
The picture that emerges from these years is a monkish man who worked over Christmas, drove a Honda Accord, and lived in a small one-bedroom apartment, long after he became wealthy. The story of his recruitment to Apple has been told and retold, often by Cook himself. Newly installed as a vice president for corporate materials at Compaq in 1997, he got an invitation to meet Steve Jobs, who’d recently returned to Apple after an extended exile. “At the time, Apple was doing very poorly, on the verge of bankruptcy,” Cook says. “Michael Dell had said something like, if he were the CEO of Apple, he would shut it down and give the remaining money to the shareholders. And he just had the courage to say what everybody thought.” But Cook met Jobs anyway – out of curiosity, mostly – and “minutes into the conversation I’m thinking, I want to do this.”
Cook explains this decision by saying that he found himself compelled to go work for a creative genius once he realised that he was talking to one. “Most of the CEOs I had met were what I think of as ‘cufflink CEOs,’” Cook says. “They’re so divorced from and isolated from real people who are working and from the products of the company. And here was this guy who was so animated about the product.” When I ask Cook why working for a creative genius was something that appealed to him, he brings up something that he’ll return to several times in our conversation, which is that Jobs was the first person he met who “really wanted to change the world,” he says. “And it wasn’t a Silicon Valley magic kind of sprinkling the dust on you. This guy really wanted to change the world. And I’d never seen that in a CEO before.”
It is now de rigueur for leaders of tech companies, even the ones that provide incredibly mundane services, like mattresses at discount prices, to talk endlessly about changing the world, but the notion that a computer company might actually do such a thing was still kind of radical in 1998, and Cook was sold. This was the era of the first coloured iMacs, and the job Cook was offered was to make those world-changing aspirations possible in a practical sense, by helping Apple ship products in a faster, more effective way that would not make Michael Dell want to sell the company off for parts. Within two years of coming aboard, Cook had cut Apple’s unsold inventory on hand from a month’s worth to two days’, beginning his climb to what would ultimately be the top job.
He did this in a remarkably calm and frictionless way. Even the stories he and other people tell from this time have a kind of studied blankness to them. To take one: Cook is at work one day when an employee, Sabih Khan, informs him about an urgent operations problem in China. Half an hour later, Cook looks up, sees that Khan is still in the room. “Why are you still here?” he asks. And Khan goes straight to the airport, flies to China, and solves it.
We are walking around a lake they have on the Apple campus when I ask Cook what this story is supposed to mean. The more times I read it, I say, the less I’m sure I understand it.
“I don’t… I think it’s just, uh, something that occurred,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s the view that I’m mean for doing it or not, but” – he laughs – “I didn’t feel that way. I don’t think he felt that way either. He’s still here. He is running all of operations today.”
Other CEOs would hammer this anecdote into their own, polish it up, perhaps append a lesson to it: in business, you need to get things done by any means necessary. But here is a fun truth about Cook: he genuinely doesn’t care how he might appear. “I think people get a little bit – they’re not sure, because if they can’t see the emotion part of it, their assumption is, there’s nothing there, or they’re not getting it, or he’s not that emotional,” Cue says. “Which is far from the truth around it.” But Cook is content to let you believe about him whatever you’d like to believe, even that he’s mean, even if he’s pretty sure he isn’t. (The other thing Cue tells people about Cook is this: “You have to engage first. And so if you’re sitting around, and you’ve never met him, and you’re waiting for Tim to call you, you might wait a long time.”)
Cook’s general lack of interest in the stories other people tell about him has not just made him unusually impervious to criticism; it has also, on occasion, allowed him to deal with whoever he needs to deal with to get his job done. “I think he’s incredibly human,” Jackson says. “But I think he’s also recognised that that doesn’t need to be brought to every situation.” When I ask Cook about a couple of notorious moments in his tenure – his dealings with then president Donald Trump, who described Cook as a “great executive, because he calls me and others don’t,” and then more recently, Cook’s elegant handling of Elon Musk, who last year went from criticising Apple on Twitter to touring the campus with Cook in under a week – Cook returns to this idea, that he is comfortable being in places where others might worry about being seen. “The philosophy is engagement,” Cook says. “I feel very strongly about engaging with people regardless of whether they agree with you or not. I actually think it’s even more important to engage when there’s disagreement.”
Cook smiles. “I’m used to being in a [room] with someone who has a different view than I do,” he says. “This is not a unique thing for me.”
IV. On the very rare occasions where Cook has voluntarily revealed something about himself, he’s done so reluctantly and usually because he judged that not doing so would cause actual harm. In 2014 he wrote about his sexuality, which had been long but quietly speculated about, for Bloomberg Businessweek. This was an uncharacteristic decision for a private man whose discomfort with talking about himself extends all the way to a reluctance to tell you what TV shows he’s currently watching. And yet: “I was getting notes from kids who had read on the internet somewhere that I was gay,” he says. “And they were at the end of their ropes. They were being pushed out by their families and sort of written out of life in a way. And I felt a responsibility to try to do something. Part of what they need to see is that life doesn’t end. And so I made that trade-off with my own privacy.”
There is only one real exception to Cook’s general circumspection, his even keel, that I have noticed, and that is on the subject of what might broadly be called the evils of technology. This is a strange fight for the CEO of Apple to pick, but Cook has now been picking it for years. In a 2019 speech at Stanford University, in the heart of Silicon Valley, in front of a sea of aspiring incubators, venture capitalists and Steve Jobses, Cook said the following: “In an age of cynicism, this place still believes that the human capacity to solve problems is boundless. But so, it seems, is our potential to create them.”
In his tenure as CEO, Cook has rarely missed an opportunity to decry, usually with a fair amount of heat in his voice, what he describes as the “data-industrial complex” – a complex built of companies who profit from the use and sale of their consumers’ personal information and data. This practice, Cook said in another public moment, “degrades our fundamental right to privacy first, and our social fabric by consequence,” and helps build an ecosystem full of “rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms.”
If you ask Cook, a notoriously private person himself, why this subject is so important to him, he will pivot the conversation back to Apple. “It’s personal for Apple in that we’ve been focused on it from the start of the company,” he told me the first time we met, for an interview in 2021. During Cook’s tenure, Apple has adopted a set of public values and practices that are particularly rigorous around privacy. “We feel privacy is a basic human right,” Cook says. “And so we try to design our products to where we collect the minimum kind of data, and as important, that we put the user in the control chair, where it’s the user’s data and they’re deciding what they want to do with it.” Think of, for instance, the recently rolled-out prompt, the tool Apple calls App Tracking Transparency, that allows you to ask not to be tracked while you’re using any given app. Companies like Meta and Google – fellow tech giants and Apple rivals – had been gathering data on their users, and monetising that data through advertising, for years. Apple has its own unique advertising business, too, and a partnership with Google that makes their search engine the default on Safari, Apple’s web browser. But Cook nevertheless led Apple to give the company’s customers this tool to prevent their data from being harvested and sold. (And in the process, just so happened to deal a blow to the business of its competitors.)
Under the banner of privacy, Apple has also forbidden companies who use their App Store to direct users out of the Apple ecosystem in order to collect money from them, even as Apple takes a commission on the transactions that occur within the store. Recently, Apple’s prohibition on what is called “sideloading” has drawn scrutiny from governments all over the world, on the grounds that the practice is anticompetitive. Cook dismisses this critique. “The App Store we developed was about creating a trusted place where developers and users could come together in a two-sided transaction,” Cook says. “And in order for that to happen, in order for the trust to be on the consumer side, we think privacy and security are vital. And otherwise, people don’t come to a store if they begin to think that their credit cards can be ripped off, if they begin to think their data can be ripped off. And if you run a different play in a world which had sideloading, what we believe is that you wind up degrading the trust and confidence of users in a significant way. You begin having all these security and privacy issues.”
Perhaps you think this is unconvincing; perhaps you believe every word. But Cook has been uncommonly successful at placing values – the idea that Apple is about more than products, more than share price – at the heart of the public image of the company. Three years ago, Apple announced its intention to be carbon neutral throughout its supply chain by 2030. This announcement, in itself, represented a fundamental change in Apple’s DNA. “We are a secretive company,” Cook says. “We like to hold what we do to ourselves until it’s time to come out and talk about it. But we’ve rewired ourselves on the values side. And so now, think about the environment – we talk about what we’re going to look like in 2030. We talk about our road maps to get there. We kind of want those items to be stolen.” Cook does a lot of this work with Jackson. “I met a lot of CEOs in my day,” Jackson says about her time heading the EPA. “And they all wanted to know what they had to do to make me go away. Occasionally, they wanted me to write a rule that would help them make more money. Or at least make them not lose money. And I respect all of that. But I think he’s been incredible in bringing to this task this idea that this is an all-of-Apple endeavour to really figure out how to be, like he always says, a ripple in the pond.”
And Cook’s natural scepticism of technology and sincere love of the natural world make him a credible messenger for a values-led company that, for instance, Steve Jobs, caustic to the core, could never have been. At one point in our conversation, for instance, I raise the prosaic but common concern that my iPhone might be gently breaking my brain. Cook, in moments like these, is happy to play therapist, and somehow – I can now say this from experience – he is a believable one, despite the part of his day job that is consumed with putting into the world as many new iPhones as possible.
“We try to get people tools in order to help them put the phone down,” Cook says, gently. “Because my philosophy is, if you’re looking at the phone more than you’re looking in somebody’s eyes, you’re doing the wrong thing. So we do things like Screen Time. I don’t know about you, but I pretty religiously look at my report.”
I have a young child who is, perhaps predictably, obsessed with my phone – he chases it around the room. When I share this with Cook, he nods with something between recognition and reproach. “Kids are born digital, they’re digital kids now,” Cook says. “And it is, I think, really important to set some hard rails around it. We make technology to empower people to be able to do things they couldn’t do, to create things they couldn’t create, to learn things they couldn’t learn. And I mean, that’s really what drives us. We don’t want people using our phones too much. We’re not incentivised for that. We don’t want that. We provide tools so people don’t do that.
V. It is an odd condition of leading a company like Apple that you are supposed to upend the basic way we all live every few years or so. One low-key way Cook has been going about this is through the growth of the company’s services business, a category that includes Apple News, Apple Pay, Apple Music, and Apple TV+. This division just set a new revenue record at Apple, bringing in £17.5 billion in its last reported quarter ending in December. “If you look back in time, a decade ago, services were a very small piece of the company,” Cook says. Today, he says, they represent slightly less than 20 per cent of Apple’s business. Last year, CODA, a film Apple bought at Sundance for £21 million, won an Oscar. “We’re in our rookie season,” Cook says. “And we’ve already won an Academy Award for best picture.” Recently, the company paid Timothée Chalamet to cut a series of ads for Apple TV+ in which he mused about various roles in its burgeoning screen universe that he would’ve loved to take on for himself. Cook personally signed off on the project. “I love that ad,” Cook says, grinning.
But there is still the feeling, in some quarters, that he is one transformative product away from history. What that product is, in the Apple way, is endlessly speculated about – speculation that has condensed, over time, into the expectation that at some point relatively soon, Apple will launch something in the augmented and virtual reality space (like, say, the aforementioned mixed-reality headset), and then maybe, down the line, something in the automotive space. Longtime followers of Apple will not be shocked to learn that Cook did not choose to announce any of these theoretical products in my presence. But he was willing to explain why Apple might – hypothetically – be interested in something in the world of AR/VR.
“If you think about the technology itself with augmented reality, just to take one side of the AR/VR piece, the idea that you could overlay the physical world with things from the digital world could greatly enhance people’s communication, people’s connection,” Cook says. “It could empower people to achieve things they couldn’t achieve before. We might be able to collaborate on something much easier if we were sitting here brainstorming about it and all of a sudden we could pull up something digitally and both see it and begin to collaborate on it and create with it. And so it’s the idea that there is this environment that may be even better than just the real world – to overlay the virtual world on top of it might be an even better world. And so this is exciting. If it could accelerate creativity, if it could just help you do things that you do all day long and you didn’t really think about doing them in a different way.”
Cook gestures at a glass pane nearby. We could measure it, he says, if we wanted to. We could put some art up on the wall, take a look at it right now. These were some of the very first AR uses people dreamed up, Cook says – imagine, in other words, what else might be possible, what else might already be invented and underway.
Years ago, when asked about the possibility of Apple manufacturing glasses, in the mould of Google Glass, an early AR product, Cook told The New Yorker’s Ian Parker that he was sceptical of the enterprise: “We always thought that glasses were not a smart move, from a point of view that people would not really want to wear them. They were intrusive, instead of pushing technology to the background, as we’ve always believed.” He said then: “We always thought it would flop, and, you know, so far it has.”
When I raise this with Cook, he laughs. “My thinking always evolves. Steve taught me well: never to get married to your convictions of yesterday. To always, if presented with something new that says you were wrong, admit it and go forward instead of continuing to hunker down and say why you’re right.”
I ask Cook if the fact that neither Google Glass nor, more recently, Meta’s Quest have made much of a dent in the marketplace might make him wary of attempting to try to manufacture something in that same space. He pauses, and then steers the conversation back to Apple’s own history of success in areas where people might have doubted its chances. “Pretty much everything we’ve ever done, there were loads of sceptics with it,” Cook says. “If you do something that’s on the edge, it will always have sceptics.” Cook says when Apple decides to enter a market, he asks himself the following questions: “Can we make a significant contribution, in some kind of way, something that other people are not doing? Can we own the primary technology? I’m not interested in putting together pieces of somebody else’s stuff. Because we want to control the primary technology. Because we know that’s how you innovate.”
VI. In January, Apple announced that Cook, at his own request, would be taking just over a 40 per cent pay cut, to £41 million. Over time, Apple has made Cook very wealthy (Forbes estimates his net worth at around £1.5 billion; in 2015, he said he intends to donate his fortune – minus whatever it takes to pay for his nephew’s college education – to charity). But in a murky economic climate, Cook says, he thought it best to make a little less for the moment. “It’s a combination of leading by example in the environment that we’re in – uh, not that we are in, but the world is in – and just feeling like it was the right thing to do. And so I did suggest it. It’s those couple things. There’s no mystery behind it.” Apple is still hiring despite the uncertain environment, Cook says, but maybe less so for the moment. Still investing, but ditto. Mostly, Cook says, “we are very much focused on the long term.”
And the long term has been good to this place: all you have to do is look outside to see that. Cook offers a walk across campus. I ask him if I need the badge that I’d been given on entering. He laughs – “They might stop both of us,” he says, raising an eyebrow.
Down two floors and outside, a sort of oscillating net of polite communications people leading the way, Cook exchanges neutral hellos with whomever we pass. He says he does this walk daily, more or less – “If you have something like this at your disposal, and you can walk and talk about things, it’s not like you’re playing hooky or something.” On the Apple campus, there are some golf carts available. “And I always like to walk,” he says, pointedly. “I’m not a cart person.”
The sun is out. Behind glass, in the building that encircles this inner courtyard, you can see groups of people in twos and threes, drawing Apple-ish curves on whiteboards. By the lake, Cook is intercepted, gently separated from me, and guided to his next meeting. He waves goodbye, leaving me to a perfect day here in Cupertino, the weather region that my iPhone has always defaulted to.
Zach Baron is US GQ’s senior staff writer.
A version of this story originally appeared in the April/May 2023 issue of British GQ with the title “Tim Cook Thinks Different ”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Mark Mahaney
Styled by Marcus Allen
Photographed on location at Apple Park
FASHION CREDITS:
From top: (1.) Jacket by Tom Ford. Shirt by Brioni. Jeans by Levi’s. Glasses (throughout) his own. Watch, Apple Watch Ultra. (2.) Shirt by Kiton. (3.) Shirt by Kiton. (4.) Shirt by Kiton. Pants by Paige. Belt by Nordstrom. Boots by Berluti. Watch, Apple Watch Series 8.
