Gregos, thank you so much for being here. I have to say that you're officially the person with the most Apple experience I have talked to, and that's so incredible.
It's incredible for me to talk to you, too. So, thank you.
You've been working at Apple for 40 years.
That was supposed to be a secret. No, actually. Yeah. Let me say for almost 40 years. Almost 40. Next year will be 40.
Of course, you've seen a lot of things come and go and products and everything. So, I have to ask you, what is the product that you have been the most excited to work with and what is your favorite of all time?
Wow, great question. Makes me have to think. I've worked on a lot of amazing products here. I worked on the iPod. That is the product that really started to change Apple, make us consumer electronics. You know, I've worked on the Mac, obviously, which is in the DNA of our company. I've worked on the iPhone that changed all of our daily lives. So, it's probably got to be an iPhone. And if you say my favorite one, I have to say, well, I don't know which one.
You know, because when you think about how far we've come, that was the product that along with the app store in 2008 that really started to change everything. And these are, you know, I don't want to just say, hey, look, because we introduced them yesterday, but that is how excited we are about these products. They're absolutely amazing. You know, the most powerful iPhone we've ever created by far. And this one also feels like you're holding the future, right? It's something that's so light, so thin, and yet so powerful. Incredible.
Yes. You know, that actually takes me to my next question, which is related to the colors. Who was the one in charge or what was the reason behind taking the decision of going to something very different? It was a bold decision going for these colors. I mean, we're talking about orange, blue, and then another option for those who want to keep something more conservative. But what was behind it?
Well, if you watched it, and I know you did watch our film from yesterday, we started the whole thing off with a design film and with a quote from Steve that design is more than how something looks. Design is how it works. For us, that is always such an important thing to think about. We work so hard to create this magical, seamless, integrated experience between hardware and software that makes using our products so much better than using anything else. We talked about how we wanted to take the Pro iPhone and make it not just a little bit better than last year, but a lot better. And that really meant redesigning it. Redesigning it so that we could make it more powerful, faster with higher sustained performance than ever before, higher antenna performance than before, house better cameras than we ever could. And that meant doing a new design. And that new design, because we wanted to create this incredible thermal capability so that we could run it just full power without feeling hot in your hand, without having to reduce the power, meant that we were going to go back to aluminum. So, in addition to all those incredible design benefits that aluminum gave us to be higher performance, we also could make it cool colors. And for years, we've had Pro iPhone customers say, 'Hey, how come the other part of the iPhone lineup always gets the cool colors and we don't get as cool colors?' Oh, yes. You know, we said, 'Okay, yeah, you've heard this, right?' So, we said, 'Okay, we're going to give them a very cool color.' And we went cosmic.
So cool. Other competitors jumped in the AI wave, and Apple decided to wait a little bit more. Why now?
We're playing a little bit different game, okay, than a lot of people. There are some amazing chatbots out there. You know, the interface, you type your question in, tell it to do this or that, answer this question. Absolutely incredible. No shortage of great solutions out there. We certainly wanted to provide that sort of capability for our users, and so we teamed up with OpenAI to provide that. But our strategy with AI was to do what Apple does: to take something that can be complex and hard to use and just make it easy to use, make it integrated in. And so what we did instead of having a chatbot that you type into, we took AI capabilities and we distributed them across our operating systems, across our products so that we meet the customers where they are. Often times you may not even know that you're using artificial intelligence to get something done. It just does it for you. So again, it's not something you go type into. It's not a destination. It's distributed across, whether it's creating an image or writing tools, or summarizing, or visual intelligence. We ship more than 20 AI features with last year's release. We have dozens more now, and you saw one of the things that got people really excited in the keynote yesterday was live translations, right? So the fact that we introduced live translations for our apps with messages and things of that sort at WWDC, but now with AirPods Pro 3, right, you can have a conversation where it is translating in your ears, and again that's using intelligence to do it. Incredible.
Incredible. Yeah. And actually that aspect you were before, I mean other competitors and everything, and it was a surprise for me to be honest. I mean, I wasn't expecting the AirPods to do that. And when I saw that and when I saw the so short delay that you have when you're hearing the translation and also the noise cancellation to make it even better, right?
Yeah. So, what happens for those who haven't seen it or seen our video, it uses noise cancellation so that the person talking to you is not distracted by hearing two voices at once. It uses that to dim down the other voice. And then there's a little delay, but it's purposeful because what we want to do is not just do word-by-word translation. Remember that was like the old translate apps you would type something into and you come with a very broken language, right? Because it was doing word by word. Instead, it's using intelligence and it's translating phrases. So, it waits for you to complete the phrase and then it translates that so that it's a much better translation than just trying to do individual words.
You have been in charge of taking really tough decisions, things like getting rid of the charging brick, getting rid of the headphones port, getting rid of the SIM cards. And at that moment, people were not so on board with those things. I mean, you got a lot of criticism, and eventually other brands started doing it. So, how do you decide this is where the market needs to go, and that other brands will follow?
Apple has always tried to have the courage to do what's important for the future. Steve used to like to quote Wayne Gretzky, an American hockey player, wasn't the biggest, fastest guy out on the ice, but he was the best. And they asked him, 'Why are you so good?' And he says, 'Because I skate to where the puck's going, not to where the puck has been.' And that's what we've tried to do at Apple. We try to build products that are going to be where things are going, not where they've been. And sometimes companies don't have the courage to let go of legacy technologies, technologies that really have seen their best day. And you brought up the SIM. It's a great example. The physical SIM is a little piece of plastic that takes up a big chunk of room in a phone for no real purpose. You know, it is the floppy disc of a mobile phone. You can do so much better by just transmitting what you need electronically. You want to change SIMs, great, do it on your phone. Don't have to find a physical place. Don't have to go to a carrier store to get it. You want to travel and you want a SIM for a local, great. Put it on your phone either through the local carrier there or there's aggregators that do this at a worldwide level. You want more than one, you want two, you want three, you want four, you want five, put six on them, you can have a whole bunch. So when I go to this country, I use this one, I go to this country, I use this one. It's so much better experience. And then it frees up that space inside which allows us to put more battery, right? That's what you need. Everybody needs battery life. Almost nobody needs a physical SIM. And a headphone port's another good one because that's what ushered in for us the world of AirPods, right? We said, 'Why should a device that you carry around is otherwise wireless have a big wire hanging out from it?' Again, it's kind of crazy when you think about it, right? We want a world that's wireless, right? We want a world that when you're using your iPhone, your headphones are just wireless. And again, at the time, like you said, people were like, 'That's crazy. That's crazy.' That's all anybody wants to use now is AirPods, right? It's like, pick your AirPods. And again, yesterday's AirPods Pro 3 are a great example. That's a way better experience than dangling a piece of wire here. We can do way better. We can do noise cancellation. We can do translation. We even have a heartbeat sensor. And it's just so much more powerful, great battery life. Put it in the case, charge it up more. Way better than wired earbuds that really did very little.
So, for now, to finish, I have a quick fire round of questions. I mean, it's not going to be that many. It's just three questions, but you know, these are simpler but interesting. Still good. So, let's do it. One app that you use every day without fail.
Well, you know, it's kind of funny. I'm going to play a little cage on this one because part of my responsibility here is I own the developer relations group. So, I own the group that works with our millions of developers around the world. So, if I answer that question for you, I'm going to make one developer very happy and I'm going to make five million developers very unhappy. So, I have to say I can't give you an answer on that one. It would be like telling my kids which one's the favorite in front of the others. Can't do it.
