To again Steve days where and and I used to play a much bigger role in that and we were never and that team has never asked for the business model they're never asked for well how's that going to improve sales no it was always the thought that we do this because it's the right thing to do
First of all, jaw is it okay to call jaw please? That's what everybody calls me, not my wife, but everybody else. Yes, good to know that. As again, I won't take that as any question answer. Welcome to Saudi Arabia for Apple. If we're talking about not only from a consumer perspective but as well from a software development perspective with the Apple Academy and all the corporations going on, it's incredibly important to us. One of the things that I've seen in my small time here is this transformation that's going on and this incredible change. You know, Apple we're founded on the idea of change. You may be too young to remember when Steve had first come back to Apple, ran a campaign, the Genius Campaign, which was all about why Apple needed to exist in the world and it was to challenge the status quo, right? It was to enable change.
Pleasure this morning of spending time here and talking to both current students and past students about their experience and it absolutely is fantastic. It warms your heart to hear their stories and they're coming out quite successful, you know, in getting jobs and getting good jobs based on what they're learning in the academy. So yeah, it's nice to play a role in that.
Brilliant. Now if we're talking about Apple Intelligence, it's being adopted as we speak by a lot of people, by millions of people around the world. What's your vision towards the future of Apple Intelligence?
Yeah, great question. You know, generative intelligence has been one of the most disruptive technologies I think I've seen in our... It's something that everybody can use. We like to say AI for the rest of us and we're just at the very beginning of the story, right? We're just starting to roll features out. We're going to bring out more and more features over time, more and more countries over time. It is just going to be such a tremendous tool in helping us get things done better, more easily, in an Apple sort of way. We're very excited about it and it's going to be the kind of thing that you're going to see us working on and focusing on for many years to come.
Brilliant. And now as your position, you're the Senior Vice President Worldwide Marketing. I've always loved the word user for our technologies. One, it's somewhat neutral, it doesn't distinguish whether you're a novice or an expert, and it's different than customer because user doesn't suggest transaction, right? It doesn't suggest just a commercial relationship. Our relationship with our users is deeper than that. It is something that you know, you've heard Tim Cook say we put the user at the center of everything we do, absolutely not the customer, yes right? It's different. It's the user. Once you've got our product, that relationship you have with our products... The customer satisfaction goes up even more if you own multiple Apple products because we engineer them to work so hard together for our users. Now customers again are prospective users, right? They're people who are considering buying our products for the first time. At that point they're a customer, right? Because they are not yet our user, right? And they're maybe about to enter in commercial interest. They say I'm going to buy your product and then once they do, we welcome them in to be one of our users and again we'll put them at the center of what we do. Does that make sense?
It does make sense. It's kind of a hierarchy as well, a place that you reach from being a customer to a user.
From your perspective, what is healthier to stay at the status for a long time? Well, I think it's very healthy to be one of our users, certainly. Like I said, it's a very... Market, you know, we can only market so many things. Yet when you become a user of one of our products, you start to sometimes maybe even subconsciously see some of the things or experience some of the things that we had countless people back in California that are sweating to make sure that experience is as good as it can be for our users. So we think that's a very healthy place to be. And one of the things I've always prized too is, you know, people love their Apple products. Yes, for our competitors, they use them. I don't think anybody quite has that expression of love that our users have for our products and we work very hard to get that love.
That's an amazing answer. Now, driven so many revolutionary products. I mean, most companies never experience any, some experience one true. When you look at our history, and as you know I'm old enough that I've been around for most of them, right? We had... I've been here for 38 years, those revolutionary 38 years. Yeah, so I just missed the introduction of the Mac, but the Mac was a new product but the Mac changed personal computing, right? It changed... It was a different interface. It was command line before. Can you imagine people today using command line? You don't know, right? It changed the way you interact with a personal computer and it changed personal computing. And of course, even the iPod, if you remember the iPod, which changed the way we listen to music, it changed the music industry and quite the world, you know? And that was always Steve's mission, right? Is to change the world for the better, absolutely. But it didn't end there. I mean, we were part of iPads, which changed tablets. Tablets were a non-existent category and we changed that. And even today, I hate to use the word tablet, you know? It's no, there's iPads and there's an iPad and other stuff. Some cultures they call it an iPad, they don't know that there's a tablet. Yeah. And even the watch and what it can do for you for health and fitness as well as extending your iPhone experience. Vision Pro allowed people to experience this new world of spatial computing. And now, as you just talked about earlier, we're on the cusp of a new era of Apple Intelligence that again we think are going to allow our... Anything being bigger than the iPhone in the App Store? Yeah, is a revolution.
Okay, now you mentioned Steve. So if Steve Jobs was alive, what's the most product that he would be excited for the past five years from you?
Yeah, that's a great question. I ask myself that all the time. I always ask, well, Steve, think, you know, when he could come back and see... I think first of all, he was so excited about the iPhone. He obviously left us too early, left us right before the introduction of the iPhone 4S. I think he'd be blown away to see the impact that the iPhone has had on the world because it was on the way to that but I think nowhere near obviously where it is today. So I can't help but think of everybody else and I know how excited we are, those of us who work on products back at Apple in California, about the incredible potential we have with Apple Intelligence and to do things again, humanizing them, doing things that make it an incredible tool for our users. And I think he'd be very excited about what he thinks, what he might probably could bring to that as well.
Brilliant. So I like the answer. Beside the iPhone, it's going to be Apple Intelligence.
I think so. I think so. And a nice thing as those two things come together. Oh yes, definitely.
Now I'm going to give you some products and the following products I want you to just tell me from those products which of the designs you like.
You know, the iBook was the first consumer laptop, you know, that was groundbreaking. The Cube, as you know, was kind of a little bit of an incredible design but a product that was a little bit of a swing and a miss. I would say I have to choose the iMac because the iMac was again part of revitalizing the company. It was reminding people why computing can be easy, you know, that you could have this all-in-one computer that you just had to plug in and it had everything you needed and you didn't have to worry about setting it up and you could move it around. True. And it's an idea and a... But you know, there was something also very beautiful about that translucent shell. Oh yeah. And the Bondi blue of the original, you know, and then the colors that came out subsequently. It's so I guess I would go with the iMac.
Brilliant. Okay, because I got two of the blues at the office. Oh, do you really? Yeah, so that's why it's a good choice, right? Absolutely. Yeah. But I like when you said that the Cube is a hit and miss because if I go to the next question, it would be with all your time at Apple, does time play a role in releasing tech that can make it or tech that... I mean, you develop at Apple technologies that developed for you to justify is it the right time to release this technology or not?
Yeah, now time plays an incredible role. Probably tough to use a hockey... And one of the greatest hockey players that lived was Wayne Gretzky and Wayne Gretzky was not the biggest guy, he wasn't the fastest guy, but yet he was the greatest. And when they asked him why, could he explain how could he explain that if he didn't have the attributes to be so great yet he was so great, what was that? And he said because he skates to where the puck is going to be. And Steve loved that quote because that's what we try to do, right? We try to understand the game around you, understand where technology is headed, where users are headed because you remember you're building this thing for, back to our term, users, right? You're... Know where things are headed, right? Where technology is headed, where the user is headed because you got to time those things together. You know, sometimes you don't, sometimes you can be ahead of the market, yes, you know, or sometimes you're behind. We're doing our best to say that we time those things together to bring a technology out when the market was ready in a way that really was valued by our customers and users, both of them.
Great answer. Now if you can spend a full day with one beautiful product on your desk and just keep in your mind design wise, okay, so keep it in mind, this product cannot be powered on. Oh, cannot be? Cannot be what? What would that product be?
Well, I'm going to go back to an iMac but I'm going to say a different one. The hemispherical space, yeah, it had the arm. The amount of engineering that went into that arm because again it had to support the screen, it was the flat screen, it had to support it in a way that allowed it to stay stable yet move. We would go out and talk about that product, we'd show some of the mechanical parts of what it took to do that and it was just absolutely beautiful on or off. But at the same time, we looked at all of our products, how do we make them beautiful? They are products that are part of your life and whether they're like an iPhone that's going with you everywhere you go or an iMac that's sitting at your desk or your... May make them smile, might light them up even before they use it. There's an Apple design quality. So I'd like to hope that any of our products could serve that purpose but I certainly don't like the idea they couldn't start up. Absolutely. Good thing that was applied by me.
