Tim Cook Discusses The Past, Present, and Future of Apple | WIRED

Thank you for doing The Big Interview, Tim. Thank you for being here, Stephen. It's always great to talk to you.

You're going across the pathway, and I think that promotes this unplanned collaboration. I think it's fantastic. Also, there's a connection here to Steve. Of course we had the theater named after him and think about him all the time, but I can feel him in other spaces in here. He had a perspective that the venue you worked in was so important to the work, and I think that he's been proven right.

Maybe. The thing that we productively on tape than you can in live because of the transitions on the stage and so forth. But you don't miss the vibe? I do miss it. I do miss it. I get it when the WWDC is here, we announce the film and the love from the developers is fantastic.

He's a friend of Apple. It's great to get feedback from Stevie, and of course his artistry is just unparalleled. He's so fantastic. But accessibility was always important for us from designing all of our products as that feedback was key.

I probably thought that before talking to Steve at that time. If you remember, Michael Dell had said if he was the CEO he would shut Apple down and just return whatever assets were left to the shareholders. Michael just said what most everyone else thought. But I have to say, when I came out to talk to Steve about working for being its purpose, I thought I've got to do this. I want to do this. From that point, I never thought that Apple would be going out of business. Other people did and other people advised me, 'Why are you doing this? You're leaving the world's largest personal computer company and going to one that may not survive.' But I didn't feel that way at that point after talking to Steve.

Revived Apple. It kind of proved Apple could survive. The iPod giving people a thousand songs in the pocket, something very unexpected and solving a pain point that all of us had that loved music. It began to introduce people to more people, particularly in the development markets. The decision to port to Windows proved that Apple could come out with a product that was larger than the Mac community. Then iPhone built on everything that came before it, and with the great work from the technology team on multi-touch, it gave you a totally different way of interfacing with the product. Then broadly, turning the industry on its side and owning the design. Because at that time, if you remember, the carrier was owning the design of the phone, sort of directing it. We said no, what we bring is the product skill and what they brought was the networking skill. We didn't have the networking skill and frankly they didn't have the product skill. This combination was very powerful. The rest is history.