Tim Cook Talks Apple Philosophy

For those outside of Apple, anyone’s guess is a good as another’s as to what the company might create next. But Apple CEO Tim Cook has given a peek behind the scenes — not into specific products per se, but into a general line of thinking that goes before any such decision.

In a lengthy interview with Fast Company, Cook laid out the company’s initial thought process when considering the development of new products.

“When Apple looks at what categories to enter,” he said, “we ask these kinds of questions: What are the primary technologies behind this? What do we bring? Can we make a significant contribution to society with this? If we can’t, and if we can’t own the key technologies, we don’t do it.”

Cook pointed to the Apple Watch (literally, as he was wearing one during the interview) as the latest example of this philosophy — which he directly credits to the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs — put into practice.

“You look at the watch, and the primary technologies are software and the UI [user interface],” he told Fast Company. “You’re working with a small screen, so you have to invent new ways for input. The inputs that work for a phone, a tablet, or a Mac don’t work as well on a smaller screen. Most of the companies who have done smartwatches haven’t thought that through, so they’re still using pinch-to-zoom and other gestures that we created for the iPhone.”

“Try to do those on a watch and you quickly find out they don’t work. So out of that thinking come new ideas, like force touch,” a feature that Cook says “makes the screen seem larger, in some ways, than it really is.”

Ruminating on the future of the Apple Watch, Cook remarks, “I don’t think anything revolutionary that we have done was predicted to be a hit when released.” (He notes that the iPad was “totally panned” by critics prior to its reaching the consumer marketplace.) “It was only in retrospect that people could see its value.”