Tim Cook is just off an overnight flight but manages his traditional, southern-tinted greeting on a crisp, cold Dublin day. “Hiiiii,” he says, beaming.
As he walks around the small Dublin office of an app developer before this newspaper interview, he has questions. A lot of questions.
“Can you prototype this?”
“Where did you get this idea from?”
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“Is this a normal Sunday for everyone here?”
As usual, he lingers a little longer than is scheduled, soaking up the studio’s work and art.
Later, he will refer back to why Apple still thinks about the intersection of art and technology, a combination that can help tech “see around the corner”.
(Whereas, by contrast, for “people that only focus on technology, those technologies have produced really unfortunate results that are distracting from society”.)
But he will also try to balance his remarks on this occasion between the company’s “unshakeable” commitment to Ireland, his view on the future of taxation, where technology is broadly going, and the ongoing live issue of Apple’s tensions with authorities over privacy.
As the CEO of the world’s most valuable company (Apple is currently trading at an all-time-high market capitalisation of €1.26trn), Cook carries a responsibility on an almost unique scale.
But whatever his other motivations, he insists that Apple’s valuation is not one of them.
“We don’t think about our market cap, or our share price, even though I know a lot of other people do. We think that the share price in the company is a result of doing other things well,” he says.
One of the relatively under-reported things that Apple is “doing well”, and which is arguably responsible for its premium valuation even as iPhone sales peak or decline, is its accessories and services.
The company’s relatively new AirPods and Apple Watch would, as stand-alone products, be bigger than the vast majority of other large tech companies, even though both were lukewarmly greeted by analysts at launch.
Cook thinks that augmented reality (AR) – a technology used by the Dublin app developer he’s visiting (WarDucks) – should be thought of in similar terms.
Apple is reportedly working on a special pair of AR glasses for release some time in the next year or two.
“My view is that it’s the next big thing. It will pervade our entire lives. And I think it’s something that doesn’t isolate people; we can use it to enhance our discussions, not use it as a substitute for human connection which, you know, I’m always deeply worried about with some of the other technologies.”
Within the industry, differences between AR and virtual reality (VR) are widely understood. But among ordinary people, familiarity isn’t as strong.
Whereas VR usually involves a headset that cuts you off from the outside world and places your eyes and ears entirely inside a digital one, AR tries to mix them by letting you see digital artefacts in the world you’re actually standing in.
At present, you can do this in a basic way with a smartphone (or a tablet) by holding it up in front of you and letting the AR app use the phone’s camera to ‘place’ a digital character ‘on’ the actual table sitting in front of you.
‘Pokemon Go’ is probably the most well-known mass-market example of the technology’s early promise.
But Cook sees more uses for augmented reality.
“Maybe you’re under a car and you’re changing the oil and you’re not sure exactly how to do it. You could use AR for this. Or you and I might be talking about an article.
“Using AR, we could both be looking at the same thing at the same time. There are many, many different applications.”
One of Cook’s other big concerns at present is privacy. Apple has positioned itself as a defender of privacy, despite a few hiccups by way of security or data breaches.
Cook has repeatedly eviscerated tech rivals such as Google and Facebook for “selling” customers’ personal data as core commercial practice.
Cynics say that this goes to Apple’s own commercial strategy, where hardware is its core financial strength, while web business is a relative soft touch.
But Cook says that there are stronger motives underlying the company’s increasingly vocal objections to online exposure.
“We worry about a world where people think every moment of the day that they’re under surveillance,” he said.
“Just consider that for a minute. If you believe that somebody is watching what you’re doing and what you’re looking at, you begin to look less.
“Maybe you don’t want people to know that you look a certain subject up or that you’re researching this other thing or that you’re trying to get an answer to a certain question.”
Cook’s fear, he says, is that “expression just begins to shrink and shrink and shrink. It should not be acceptable for any of us to live in that kind of environment”.
This view has pitted Apple against some tough ideological opponents. Authorities in the UK and the US have repeatedly tried to get the company to provide a back door through its iPhones’ encrypted security features to help criminal or terrorist investigations.
Each time, Apple says no, even when US president Donald Trump tweets his displeasure about the company’s stance, as he did last week.
But Cook rejects the argument that if you’re not with the security forces, you’re aiding the terrorist.
“They say that privacy and security are a trade-off, but we see that as a false choice,” he said.
“Because if you look at what people are doing on their phones today, people are operating power grids on their phones, where a system administrator uses a phone as their device. So you can imagine the damage that can be done to national security if somebody hacks through and affects the power grid. So in a sense, privacy and security come together.
“They don’t oppose one another. It’s not a see-saw of having more of one is having less of the other.”
Such comments are unlikely to sway bodies such as the FBI, which comes back to Apple regularly with requests on cases it’s working on.
But Cook has form here. When the then UK prime minister David Cameron ramped up the political rhetoric against Apple’s iPhone encryption, painting a you’re-with-us-or-against-us narrative, Apple held firm.
Cameron eventually backed down, as did Theresa May. It’s hard to see why Cook or Apple would capitulate to president Trump now.
One topic which is trickier to present as a black-and-white one is the issue of tax.
On stage at the National Concert Hall, the IDA’s Martin Shanahan asked Cook about “the elephant in the room”: Apple’s €13bn tax ruling handed down by the European Commission in 2016.
The case, which is being appealed both by Apple and Irish revenue authorities, will probably continue for years to come.
But Cook offered some wider thoughts on the issue of tax and large international companies.
“It’s very complex to know how to tax a multinational,” he said. “It’s not like a small business that does all of their stuff generally in one country.
“A multinational might manufacture in one country, service in another, sell in another, and do research and development in another. And so somebody has to decide how to apportion the profits and, therefore, the tax payments.”
He said that it was a “really reasonable subject for people to debate” as a policy issue.
“I think reasonable people can have different points of view,” he said.
“I think the place for that to happen is at a worldwide level, because you can bet that each country is going to have a different point of view. Companies shouldn’t have anything to do with this; they should just follow the law. And so the OECD, I think, is the place for this.”
Apple, he said, “desperately wants” it to be fair.
“This is where the issue comes in the commission. We believe that law should not be retrofitted, that the law is the law, and the law can change going forward but it shouldn’t change going backwards.
“That is at the heart of the case if you just make it very simple. It is before the court now and we have great faith in the justice system.”
He went on to say that he was “optimistic” that the OECD could create a clearer tax code.
“I think they have to. This is never going to be one that everybody is going to say ‘yeah, great’ because everybody would like a little bit more.
“But I think that they [the OECD] are the place for it to happen. And I think that, logically, everybody knows it needs to be re-hauled.”
He added: “I would be the last person that would say that the current system is a perfect system.”
Cook repeated Apple’s assertion that it is the “largest taxpayer in the world”.
“We do so willingly, not grudgingly,” he said. “The [European] Commission has a different perspective on who we should pay. And the way that we look at it, and I believe it’s the way Ireland looks at it as well, is that we have paid them per the law.”
Cook didn’t let the occasion go without making a prediction about the company’s operations in Cork.
“We’ve been here now 40 years,” he said. “And like every good relationship, there’s been some ups and downs for both parties. But we came here at a time of very high unemployment in Cork. Now, we’ve grown to a 6,000-plus employee base that has 100 nationalities in it. I look forward to being here the next 40 years.”
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