Apple CEO Tim Cook doesn’t grant many interviews, so when he does take the hot seat there’s always a lot of interest in what he has to say.
In this case – an on-stage grilling at the Wall Street Journal’s global tech conference – Cook spoke about the upcoming Apple Watch’s battery life, Apple Pay, the company’s plans to reinvent television and its attitude to customer privacy.
Time for TV?
Cook also confirmed that Apple has plans for television. He said of the current experience of watching TV, “We’re living in the 1970s” and that Apple recognised that there’s “a lot to be done in this area”. Of course, he was reluctant to say more than that, but the suggestion is that the company is looking at sparking a top-down revolution in the way TV programming is sold and consumed – doing for TV what iTunes did for music retail and playback, perhaps?
He spoke a little about Apple Pay and some consumers’ concerns regarding security and privacy. He said Apple Pay was “more secure” than traditional credit cards and that shoppers would embrace it because it’s a “pain in the butt” to have to replace cards that are compromised or cloned.
He also said that Apple Pay wouldn’t be tracking your purchases in order to better target you with ads in the future (oh hey, Google!): “We don’t want to know what you buy, we’re not into collecting data, we’re not Big Brother. We’ll leave that to others.” Cook went on to say that Apple does not read users’ iMessages and designed the service specifically for privacy.
Source: Wall Street Journal