Tim Cook on the culture that led to iPhone X, Air Pods, Apple Watch 3, and HomePod

Tim Cook from this FastCompany interview:

Even when we were idling from a revenue point of view–it was like $6 billion every year–those were some incredibly good years because you could begin to feel the pipeline getting better, and you could see it internally. Externally, people couldn’t see that.

On products like iPhone not being embraced right away:

[People said] it could never work because it didn’t have a physical keyboard. With each of our products there’s that kind of story. Over the long haul, you just have to have faith that the strategy itself leads to [financial results] and not get distracted and focus on them.

On distractions:

The priorities are about saying no to a bunch of great ideas. We can do more things than we used to do because we’re a bit bigger. But in the scheme of things versus our revenue, we’re doing very few things. I mean, you could put every product we’re making on this table, to put it in perspective. I doubt anybody that is anywhere near our revenue could say that.

On following into a product category:

I wouldn’t say “follow.” I wouldn’t use that word because that implies we waited for somebody to see what they were doing. That’s actually not what’s happening. What’s happening if you look under the sheets, which we probably don’t let people do, is that we start projects years before they come out. You could take every one of our products–iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch–they weren’t the first, but they were the first modern one, right?

In each case, if you look at when we started, I would guess that we started much before other people did, but we took our time to get it right. Because we don’t believe in using our customers as a laboratory. What we have that I think is unique is patience. We have patience to wait until something is great before we ship it.

You could make the argument that HomePod followed Amazon Echo and Google Home into the smart speaker market. But as we discussed in the latest Dalrymple Report, the HomePod has been around for a long time, long enough that it could have been a Steve Jobs brainchild.

There’s a lot more to read in this interview. Feels like a deeper look than most Tim Cook interviews.