According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook held a rare all-hand meeting after bringing together iPhone makers revenue and employees, and then gathering employees from the company. Cook spoke to Apple officials in the auditorium on the company's campus, telling them that the AI revolution is “large but larger” than the internet, smartphones, cloud computing and apps.
“Apple has to do this. Apple does this. It's like ours,” Cook reportedly told employees.
“We'll make the investment to do that,” he added.
In particular, Cook also spoke about Apple being “open” to mergers and acquisitions during the company's revenue call. Previous reports say Apple is internally discussing the purchase of Mistral AI from AI search startup Perplexity or France.
“We were rarely the first”: Tim Cook tells Apple employees
Last year, Apple lagged behind Openai, Alphabet, Microsoft and others when it announced the features of Apple Intelligence. Even after these features were announced, the company was unable to deliver on time for the launch of the iPhone 16, but many of them also fell into controversy.
However, Cook seemed less troubled by the late rollout on the Apple Intelligence patch, telling staff “we were rarely the first thing.”
“We had a PC in front of the MAC. We had a smartphone in front of the iPhone. We had a lot of tablets in front of the iPad. We had an MP3 player in front of the iPod,” Cook said.
However, Apple has created “latest” versions of these product categories. “This is how I feel about AI,” he said.
At the hour's address, Cook discussed a variety of topics, including the retirement of Apple COO Jeff Williams, an increase in Apple TV+ viewers, and advances in healthcare features such as Airpods' hearing aid technology. There were also discussions on donations and community services from Apple employees, the iPhone manufacturer's goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2030, and the impact of regulations.
“The reality is that big technology is undergoing a lot of scrutiny around the world,” Cook said.
“We need to keep pushing and letting the regulatory intent be delivered instead of these things that destroy the user experience and the privacy and security of our users,” he added.
