Men’s magazine GQ has today published an extensive interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook. The interview goes over Cook’s upbringing and the experiences that shaped him to be arguably one of the most successful CEOs of all time.
Cook begins his day at around 5 AM, reading customers’ emails and attending personal training. His demeanor and facial expression is described as “very hard to read” by his lieutenant Senior Vice President of Services, Eddy Cue. Cook is described as sporting a calm yet commandeering attitude, unlike similar high-profile leaders in Silicon Valley. His attitude allows him to be “unusually impervious” in dealing with external judgement, adds the interview.
The interview discusses Cook’s humble childhood spent in Robertsdale, where his father worked in a shipyard. Cook graduated with an industrial engineering degree from Auburn University, spending his early career at IBM, Intelligent Electronics, and Compaq. Cook ended up at Apple after personally meeting Steve Jobs, calling the latter a person “who really wanted to change the world”.
Cook talks about his succession of Jobs, describing feeling as “totally gutted, totally empty” in the first few weeks after the late co-founder’s death. Cook acknowledges that he nor anybody could mimic Jobs and in turn, has settled on being “the best version of myself”.
Rebuking the criticism that paints Cook as not being as hands-on as his predecessor, he states that innovation does not single-handedly stem from one person or group in the entire company. He argues that innovation is “expected everywhere in the company”, a position that Jobs himself held. Cook does not reflect back often on the new products that Apple launched under his command, simply stating that “we don’t really look back very much at all in history”.
We’re always focused on the future and trying to feel like that 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.
Tim Cook reflecting on Apple’s past achievements
Cook remained tight-lipped as ever when pressed on Apple’s antiticapated entry into the AR/VR market. He, however, did talk up the nascent technology’s future, stating that it “could empower people to achieve things they couldn’t achieve before”, further emphasizing its collaboration and creativity appeal.
The idea that you could overlay the physical world with things from the digital world could greatly enhance people’s communication, people’s connection. 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.
Tim Cook on AR/VR appeal
The interview raised Cook’s answer in a similar 2015 interview to The New Yorker regarding his skepticism of early AR products like Google Glass. Cook labelled Google’s initiative as a flop and not something that Apple would pursue. He seemingly now retracts his earlier remarks stating that “my thinking always evolves”, and as Jobs once taught him “not to be married to your convictions of yesterday”.
Cook is not worried about the seeming failure of more established market players like Meta’s Quest division to herald the market into the mainstream’s eyes. Cook recalls Apple’s past successes of hit products amid staunch cynicism from industry observers:
Pretty much everything we’ve ever done, there were loads of skeptics with it. If you do something that’s on the edge, it will always have skeptics. 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.
Tim Cook on Apple’s entry into new product categories
The interview concludes with Cook’s voluntary 40% pay cut to this year’s personal compensation:
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.
Tim Cook on his pay cut
Cook also adds that Apple has not completely frozen its hiring, albeit in a much more slower manner as the company remains committed to focusing on the long term.
