A
new interview with Apple design head Sir Jonathan Ive and
recent remarks by CEO Tim Cook are shedding some light (and building up hype) for both the Apple Watch and the current outlook of the company and the men who run it. Ive, in an interview with London's
Financial Times, explains the rationale behind the development of the Apple Watch, while Cook expanded on his view on privacy, and Apple's industry leadership. In other news, a forthcoming Apple Watch app has already set the bar to a new low.
Eerily mirroring the story of how Steve Jobs persuaded a satisfied Tim Cook, then a well-regarded HP operations executive, to come to Apple at one of its lowest-ever points, Ive told the
Financial Times that he was not originally much of a fan of computers, but that the "sense of the humanity" behind the machine's design intrigued him, and that it was the first such computer that encouraged people to "start to develop a relationship with the product, in that you feel it's the result of the great care taken by the people who worked together to develop it. And you respond to that." He responded by going to work for the company in 1992.
Jobs and Ive at early Apple Store opening
"This is difficult to describe, and it could be misinterpreted very easily, but there is a sense of almost serving your fellow humans," Ive said of the idea behind the best Apple products. He felt that the sense of connection Apple had with its customers was lost after Jobs left the company in the late 80s, and didn't return until Jobs returned in the late 90s to rescue the firm.
"When [Jobs] came back to Apple in 1996, the first thing we worked on together was the iMac, which was a personal consumer computer. So I think Apple's contribution has always been at its most significant when it's trying to make personal products." That, he told the paper, is what ties the new Apple Watch to the rest of the company's legacy. "This watch is clearly the most personal product we've made."
Ive's remarks on the company's ability to form a personal relationship with its customers ties in with Cook's emphasis on one of Apple's key differentiating aspects from most of its biggest competitors; the strong belief in personal privacy. It was the
main topic of his talk with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, according to
Bild magazine: he said that the German government "has the same views on privacy as I do" and in an interview with the UK paper the
Telegraph,
added that "none of us should accept that the government or a company or anybody should have access to all of our private information."
Cook with German Chancellor Angela Merkel
"This is a basic human right," Cook said. "We all have a right to privacy. We shouldn't give it up. We shouldn't give in to scare-mongering, or to people who fundamentally don't understand the details." He went on to say the revelations by Edward Snowden of the massive amount of data collected by the government on both foreign nationals and its own citizens accomplished at least some good by "getting us to talk more about these things. [Apple's] values [with regards to privacy and data-collection] were always the same."
Cook reiterated that because Apple is not built on an ad-driven model -- unlike Google, Android, and social media sites like Facebook -- it has no interest in users' personal information other than what is absolutely required to make certain services work or collect feedback. The company tries to leave personal information on the device where necessary, and does not retain what it collects.
"We don't read your emails, we don't read your messages, we find it unacceptable to do that ... we have designed Apple Pay purposely so that we don't know where you buy something, how much you pay for it, what you bought. We don't want to know any of that." He also noted that users were always free to easily disable or opt-out of any data collection if desired. "We are not a treasure trove of data. It is a cop-out to say 'choose between privacy or security.' There is no reason why customers should have to select one. There is no reason not to have both."
Cook at Bild headquarters in Berlin
This has meant that the company has had to modify some of the areas where it used to be notoriously secretive: "We are working on our social responsibility. We realized that we can actually change some more things in the world if we are extremely transparent around social issues like privacy, security, education, or the environment. If Apple improves working conditions, this might possibly put some pressure on other manufacturers to copy it. This is an area where I wish that others copy us."
"We are still secretive about our coming products," he said. "So if you ask me what we are working on I'm not going to answer this question." When he was asked about the Apple car, he replied simply: "I have read the rumors. I can't comment on it."
Both men, in the separate interviews, commented on the importance of lessons that Steve Jobs taught them, and how his shadow still lingers even in products that he had no personal hand in, such as the Apple Watch. Cook said that Jobs "was by far the best teacher I ever had. You will probably never read this in a book, because people focus on other parts of his personality. He taught me that the joy is in the journey. That it's not in an event, it's not in shipping a product, or an award. It's in the journey itself."
Ive spoke about how Jobs impressed upon him and others in the company that same philosophy, that the process of development mattered as much as the finished product, and that making a great product was ultimately more important than making a successful product, though the two generally went hand-in-hand, at least to an extent. While it is not always the actual best product in a given field that are the most successful in terms of sales, first-class products always find an audience, and always do well enough to thrive -- and the satisfaction of making them and using them often outweighs the short-term thrill of being the top seller.
"The best products are those where you have optimised each attribute, while being very conscious of other parts of the product's performance," Ive said. He added that the entire Apple Watch team, from CEO Cook down to the most junior engineer, was obsessed with "how we can make [it] as good as possible rather than how many we'll sell ... [the Watch] is incredibly mature, and has gone through thousands and thousands of hours of evaluation and testing, [and] we're still working and improving."
"I quite like this sense of almost being careless and just glancing [at the product]. I think for certain things, the wrist is the perfect place for this technology," Ive added. He noted that unlike some previous products, Apple did not enter into designing a watch because it thought the current products were inferior.
"It was different with the phone -- all of us working on the first iPhone were driven by an absolute disdain for the cellphones we were using at the time," Ive said. "That's not the case here. We're a group of people who love our watches. So we're working on something, yet have a high regard for what currently exists."
Ive noted that this made designing a watch that the company thought genuinely trumped what was already on offer genuinely difficult, but the company felt that the classic artisan effort of creating a timeless timepiece was well-matched to the company's mission of making technology more important in people's personal lives. "[I have] always liked the idea that if we are heavy in our thinking, we can be much lighter in the implementation."
His regard for the personal nature of the wearable product extends, as it often does, to even the details of the packaging. "There's a huge virtue, I think, in keeping the packaging small: at least, it is the right choice environmentally. It's [also] easier to move things around, and you don't end up with your wardrobes full of large watch boxes that you don't use."
Finally, in related news, the first Apple Watch "fart app"
has been announced. The app, dubbed the "Fart Watch," remotely triggers a user's iPhone - which is commonly in one's pocket - as the speaker for the novelty sound effect, thus solving one of the major problems with similar apps for the iPhone to this point. "We've packed dozens of high-quality, lossless sounds into one tiny device," say the creators, who won the Audience Choice award at the Fall 2014 WatchKit Hackathon. It will be available shortly after the release of the Apple Watch, though pricing has not yet been announced.
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