Transcription
AI, uh, in Apple's view, can be used as this incredibly empowering thing. But there is a sense that things are changing very fast in ways that I think it's hard for any normal person to keep up with. And while I think we can look at this as, you know, yet another thing of the scale of the industrial revolution, which changed our world in a, in a giant way, um, that displaced a lot of people in the process, and still occurred over like 80 years, and now this is happening in a compressed time frame. And so I think it's fair for people to say, wow, I'm, I'm not quite certain what this is going to mean for me.
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I'm Lori Seagull, and you're listening to Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens. Craig and Jaws, I'm so happy to be sitting here with y'all. So, to give context to the folks who are listening, you are Chief of Software, Chief of Marketing, very fancy titles. I want to start specifically with what I think so many folks have been thinking about, which is Apple and artificial intelligence. Um, when I was watching you, Craig, on stage, there was one line I wrote down that you said that I thought was really interesting because there's been so much anticipation, uh, about Apple and AI. And you said, um, that some developers seem to be racing to develop AI for the sake of AI. Yeah. Um, without thinking of people. And then you said, truly helpful AI must be centered around you. So I thought maybe starting the conversation, with what does AI centered around me actually mean? What does that look like?
Well, I think that's central to who Apple always is around everything we do. I mean, if you think going back to the beginnings of this company, there were these nascent technologies in the form of microprocessors and, uh, you know, our founders said, how can we make something useful out of this, useful to people? And then you look at graphical user interfaces and mobility with iPhone, and all of this is where there's all this technological possibility out there. And initially, it's used by people are trying to figure out, what is this all for? What does this mean to people? And I think for Apple, the question is, don't say, "I've got a hammer and let me look for a nail." Think about, start with the person and their experience and how you could make their lives better, and then look for the things that could enable that and build useful experiences out of that. And that's what, for us, AI is another one of those capabilities that fulfills, uh, all of these things that we've wanted to do for so long in designing these experiences, but where that ability for the system, the machine to really understand you and what you were trying to accomplish was only so capable. And now there's this leap in capability. And so now it can connect with things that we think we've always wanted our, uh, phone and our iPads and our Macs to do, uh, for us. And we know that our customers feel the same way, and now we're trying to bring that to them. But that's, that's where it starts. It starts at, what's something that matters to you that would, uh, uh, make your, uh, day a little bit better, uh, let you feel a little bit more empowered. And if we can bring this technology to bear on that problem, uh, that's a, that's a wonderful role for Apple to play.
I, um, I cover all sorts of different AI companies and what they're trying to do and what their mission is. And over the last years, it's been fascinating because, you know, you're talking to folks like who say they want to cure loneliness with AI. And as I was sitting there listening to what y'all were announcing on stage, and just to give a little bit of the things that I'm, that I were like, "Oh, I would use this," or, "Oh, okay. I would probably use this." You know, point your iPhone at the bill, be able to split the bill. Tab organization, like Tabaholic. I like in front of y'all. [laughter] I have so many tabs open right now. It stresses me out. The notes app. I have like, very disorganized notes. I took a lot when you were speaking. Um, but now you're able to use Siri, right-click it, and the next thing you know, it can organize it and send an email. You can have it scan and look at text messages and, you know, get a podcast in that way. Um, spatial reframe. I mean, not to, I'm not going to announce all the things that you back at you. We don't need to do an announce. [laughter] We're good. But what I, but my point in all of this is like, when I think about this anticipation about what Apple's going to announce, and don't get mad at me for saying this, okay, it's not sexy. It's, well, it is to the developers. It's not like sexy [laughter] like you're going to cure loneliness or like cancer, but it's, it's utility to some degree.
Usefulness and usefulness. So, is that the point of it? Is that?
I think that utility is at the foundation of human creativity and ultimately time for connection, right? I mean, I think the, the, the, uh, the unlock around all of this is that you get to live the rest of your life and you get to feel really empowered doing it. I, I guess that's where the, the sexy part comes in, right? I don't think the sexy part actually belongs in the computer. It belongs, it belongs in your life. Uh, and so that's, that's our focus. I mean, the idea of AI as a solution for loneliness. I mean, loneliness is about a lack of connection to real people, you know, real humans.
We do think it should be real people.
And we think we're, we're 100%. [laughter]
To confirm, there are no AI girlfriends or boyfriends being created with the updated Siri AI.
No, no, no. Quite, quite the opposite. Because as, as you may know, if you use many of the existing chatbots, they're really focused on engagement to a large degree. Like they, they, uh, and sick of fancy, right? They, they kind of want to pull you in. Uh, they might encourage you to reveal things about yourself and then use that as a basis to establish a connection. Uh, and we view it quite the opposite. I mean, the way that we have designed Siri, Siri really wants to say, "Listen, that's not what I'm here for, right? I'm here to, I'm here to help you. I can help you get things done. I can help you learn about the world." But if you try to engage Siri as a romantic partner, Siri's not up for that. Yeah. Siri's 100% not into that.
Fine. Yeah, that's, um, you know, Jaws, I, I said I saw something that you said in an interview about how you almost like sometimes, and if I slaughter it, you'll tell me, but you don't want people to even know sometimes it's AI, or you like it when they don't realize it's AI, it kind of disappears. So, can you paint the picture of what that looks like?
Well, like Craig said, that goes back a lot to our roots. We like when technology disappears, right? You just focus on what you want to do or you focus on the content. And it's the same thing with AI. Craig said it, and you referenced it. We don't do AI for AI's sake. "Hey, look at us, we're doing AI." It's, how does AI make everything better? And that makes our products better, our features better. And I love it when AI actually made that feature better. You didn't have to know you're an AI. We don't want our, our users to have to be prompt experts, right? To get, uh, to get value out of what we're doing in our features. We want to meet them where they're at. Have the products and features become better, and this is just a really helpful technology in making those features and products better.
Yeah, you, you mentioned a few of our features and thank you again for doing that. Uh, [laughter] but if you think about something as simple as, you, you receive a text message, people are talking about dinner. Someone says, "How about this weekend? Let's get together at 6." And we just drop a, a little button into the chat transcript that says, "Add to Calendar." Right now, it turned out there had to be a bunch of AI to understand that you were talking about an event. And then when you hit "Add to Calendar," and it figures out, looking, reading that conversation, it understands, oh, here's where it, here's where it is. Here's, uh, when it is, here's who it's with. And so up comes a little sheet with a filled-out calendar event. Well, to you, that's just, oh, of course, right? As a human, that seems like the most natural thing in the world. Well, that was a bunch of AI trying to understand something. But you didn't have to think about, I'm interacting with AI. You just thought, oh, add to calendar. Good. Hooray. Move on. You know, TDM eliminated.
So much of, um, what y'all are talking about with the updated Siri, uh, is comes down to it understands your personal context.
Can you explain what that means to, to folks who might not understand?
Yeah, it can be everything from understanding, you know, who your child is, who your parent is. You'll often want to refer in really natural terms to, "Send this to Mom," or, "Where, where, where's my kid?" Um, and understands who those people are so it can solve the problem for you in the most natural way. Um, it's also about where are you in the moment. You know, I use Siri now where I'm, uh, looking at some information about a show. I see an actor and I wonder, uh, where did they grow up? I, I just literally type, "Where did they grow up?" and it knows what I'm looking at at that moment. I'm not typing their name or, or doing a bunch, and it can draw from the context of exactly as if, as if Siri is there with me, understands what I understand, and can take the next step with me.
What I love about that too is, to make it clear, we don't know that.
Great point.
Your device, your iPhone or your Mac or iPad, by the way, works across all of them. It knows this, right? Through this incredibly private by design mechanism that does not send this all to something that we become profiling you and creating a, you know, monetization opportunity out of you. No, this is very private information. It stays on your device.
Yeah. And that, that's so critical because I, I think it is a challenging thing for a lot of people to understand the distinction between what your iPhone knows and what, say, Apple as a company knows. Your iPhone is yours, right? Your data is yours, and it stays on your phone and your control, and Siri is using it for you. Apple doesn't get to know any of this stuff, and that is very, uh, different than I think most, most players in the space, and I think super important.
I would love to get, I definitely want to get into privacy. I'd love to get into design decisions.
Yeah.
Um, it's so interesting. You walk around Apple Park. It's very tran, just for our listeners and viewers, it's very tranquil here. Yes. Um, it is, and you really kind of get the sense of privacy too, right? It's almost like there's like compounds that look like Genius Bars. I mean, it's crazy. It's really interesting. I was, my first time, aviation, the whole world.
Yeah.
As my first, as my first time here. But I imagine that the conversations that y'all have behind the closed doors here about design, um, really impact everything because when it comes to the future of AI, and you mentioned this a little bit, this idea of ending with a question mark or these AI, AI that is really agreeable. I was joking with Jaws the other day and said that, um, ChatGPT recently said to me, "Mom, to Mom." And I was [laughter] like, wow, LLM, you're not a mom, you know? But, and I'm sure that with some kind of error. But these design decisions, the decisions you make behind closed doors here at Apple Park, can impact all of our lives. So, can you take, before Craig gives you a meeting answer, let me tell you one of my favorite moments yesterday. [laughter] We announced the changing of the curve of the corner of our windows, and people cheered. [laughter] And that's because design is so important to Apple. It is so important to our users. It is so important to our developers. I couldn't imagine another company on the planet that would have a meeting like that and talk about a detail like that, which would get cheering from the crowd. That's how important it is to us in our community. So what you're bringing up is huge. Now, let you go into the meeting. To that point, design when it comes to AI can mean life and death. You know, I spoke to a mother who lost her son after, uh, after he became addicted to a character AI chatbot. And so I, you know, I am, I am curious about the conversations. If you could just give us, take us to the rooms. I know y'all are very secret.
Yeah.
I know you don't say anything, but if you prefer [laughter] to want to say something.
Yeah.
Tell us about the design decisions behind the scenes. Like, what did you decide not to do in order to make safer, human-first AI?
Well, I think Jaws touched on one part of design, which of course is attention to detail. That's, that's a huge part of who Apple is, and we have customers who resonate with that to a degree that they hold us to the highest standard. But the other part of design is rooted in our values. I mean, who people are drawn to Apple for specific reasons because of who we are. We, we grew up, many of us, we grew up with Apple technology in our lives. We were attracted to this place because of the way it resonated. And so there is a common set of values that are beneath everything we do. And we all have families and friends that use these products. We ourselves are huge users of our product. We're not, we're not building this for someone else that we don't understand or care about. We're building this first and foremost for people that are the closest people in our lives. And so the design process is all about, well, what would I want to, uh, for myself and for people I care about to have in the world? Something that doesn't exist, something that's missing, something that could be made better. And that's where our discussions start in all of these cases where we're talking about how it should be and what's the, what's the right thing that would be better in the world. And there are a lot of, we talk about the rock tumbler at Apple, which is,
a lot of ideas. The rock tumbler. I mean, it's a wonderful story that, that Steve Jobs told years ago about, well, was involved in a neighbor and showing him if you put these rough gravel into one of those machines that slowly rotated and all the rocks banged off each other, that after enough time, what came out as an unbelievably beautiful polished stone. And that's to say that a bunch of people come together in this design process with different ideas, different perspectives, and we bang off each other, right? It's not, it's not a completely sterile, organized process. It's throwing a lot of ideas around, trying them out, respecting everyone's points of view, and ultimately coming out with something better than any one of us could have possibly managed ourselves. I, I, I mean, the other element of this at Apple is design is inherently an iterative process. You have to try things. Something that sounds good in concept, if you just try to rush that straight out to the public, that probably wasn't an actual good idea. You try it out and you realize what's good about it, what needs work on it. And so we all live on our, our products under development for a long time before the public ever sees them. Right.
Right. And that in that process, we immediately discover so much and we get back together and we say, "Hey, this is what felt like it worked, and this is what what didn't work, and this is something that's missing." And so you talk about a meeting, but it's, it's not just one meeting. It's, it's many, many, many meetings. And I, I think you'd be surprised at the people that are in that room are, you know, most of the executive team at times. I mean, we pull together from an incredibly diverse set of talents from every level of the organization because there's nothing more important than the substance of how our products work, and everyone at the company cares about it, and so we're, we're all deeply involved.
It's, it's also worth building on one thing you said earlier. The motivations of Apple are different than some other companies. Craig mentioned it when we, how we give you an answer in Siri versus maybe how some other people do it. We're not motivated to keep you engaged and keep you on your device.
You know, that is?
Well, we are, we all are already addicted to our.
Well, but that is, that is not what we're trying to do because that is, there's no benefit to us in that, right? Some people, their whole business model is about, I need to keep you in what you're in. I need to keep you in my app, my experience. That's how I make my money. That's not us. So we can truly be built around what is the user need, not how do we keep you engaged. And so that changes the way that the design works. To Craig's point, we can deliver a more concise answer. We don't have to try to encourage you to say, "Hey, now take it further, take it further," because that isn't the, give you the answer. If you want to go further, you can, but we're not trying to drive you to go further.
Right. Absolutely. Right. One of the things, um, before we move on from from AI just in general, that I thought was so fascinating, uh, when you talk about meeting people with problems they have, is now with this update, we're going to get notifications. We've already always gotten notifications from Apple that, uh, our passwords are leaked somewhere, they need to be changed. But now, uh, what you guys are actually going to be able to do is go log in and change passwords. I, I wrote this question. My producer looked at it and she's like, "Wait, what?" So, [laughter] I, I just, for the people, I need you to explain. You're going to make us safer. That's also terrifying. Like, how does that, how does that work? And it's, it's super interesting, especially now that, uh, so much of our data has been leaked. So much of our data is out there now.
Yeah. Yeah. So for, for some time now, uh, our, our Passwords app, of course, it could analyze what passwords, uh, you've used that you've recorded with the Passwords app that it knows are weak passwords. If you, if you have the password, you know, "welcome" or "password," you know, we're going to say, "Hey, bad choice." But we also know passwords were exposed in data leaks, data breaches, and we can flag for you, "Hey, this password is known to attackers." Not necessarily known that you use that password, but they maintain a whole dictionary of all the passwords they've ever seen, and they use them to brute-force attack accounts. And so if you're using one of those, that's an insecure password. So we've been great in pointing it out, but of course, we all have better things to do than painstakingly go to every site, find a password change, and come up with a new password. But Safari's always known how, when you were in the password change field, to say, "Here's a more secure password. I could fill that into these fields, and I could save it for you as a replacement for your bad password." Well, now that we have the AI and these agentic technologies that can actually operate a webpage behind the scenes, it can go to the website for you in the background, sort of running a little version of Safari behind the scenes. Go to that password change screen for you. Enter your past password that you had in the password field. Come up locally on your device. This isn't going to Apple, but with a password only known to your iPhone. Put it in the field as the new password. Save it off in the Passwords app. And next time you go to the site, Safari is going to autofill that secure password for you, and no longer are you using that insecure password.
It's super cool. Well, I, I do think, um, you know, we hear so much from Apple about bringing humanity and that it's making things personal. And I think, um, over in Silicon Valley, and it is, it is beautiful here and on campus, and it really feels like you're living in the future to some degree. And then I, I sometimes step out and you see so many folks who have anxiety about artificial intelligence in jobs, who have the rise of sexually explicit deep fakes in high schools. Um, this year. I mean, I don't know if you all were commencement speakers this year, but good luck if you were, because you're getting booed for anything AI-related. Yeah.
Um, what do you say to folks, as, as folks who kind of sit with a front-row seat to the future? What do you say to folks who are worried about AI and its role in our lives as it's going?
Yeah, I have kids of, of roughly that age, spanning those ages, and they're, they're all deeply ambivalent about it. Uh, you know, and I think, I think Americans are very deeply ambivalent about it in ways that, interestingly, people in China seem to be much, much less so. So it's an interesting phenomenon right now. Uh, but I, I, I think it's, with some good reason. I think that AI, uh, in Apple's view, can be used as this incredibly empowering thing, as we talked about earlier. But there is a sense that, uh, for one, things are changing very fast in ways that I think it's hard for any normal person to keep up with. Uh, there's uncertainty about where does this all lead. And while I think we can look at this as, you know, yet another thing of the scale of the industrial revolution, which changed our world in a, in a giant way, um, that displaced a lot of people in the process, and still occurred over like 80 years, and now this is happening in a compressed time frame. And so I think it's fair for people to say, wow, I'm, I'm not quite certain what this is going to mean for me. And if you're a student and you're thinking, did I study the right thing? Is the job that I thought was this, the skill that I thought was going to be useful, is that the one that's going to be useful now that AI is quickly learning all of these things? I think those are all reasonable thoughts to have. Uh, you know, we're, we're in California. We're optimists. Uh, we're trying to do the right thing where we can build the right, play the right role in our sense. And I, I do think, uh, in the end, this all has a happy ending. But I can certainly relate to people who say, wow, this is a big change. I mean, honestly, there is no, at this moment in time, there is no bigger place where there's that change than in software engineering. It's literally the first job that AI is showing that it can do to an incredible degree. And so everyone who works in my organization is saying, wow, this thing does a lot of things that I used to take a lot of pride in being, you know, spending decades learning to do well, and it already does it well.
What has to be true for there to be a happy ending?
Well, for our part, we're doing our part, right? We're building it around you. We're building, you know, as Craig talked about earlier, as we discussed, we're trying to look at it as a tool for you. You know, I've been around long enough, uh, that I remember personal computers coming and people having similar anxieties. It was the idea, why would I ever need an accountant now that there's Lotus 1-2-3, which was the predecessor to things like Excel? And the reality is, it didn't replace accountants. It became a powerful tool for accountants that allowed them to do more. Um, and I think a lot of computing has been that way over years. To Craig's point, this is a lot happening fast. Yeah.
And that uncertainty is certainly understandable. Uh, that's why again, companies like Apple are important because we're trying to bring the humanity to these things in what we do.
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I want to talk a little bit about privacy. There was talk of rebuilding Siri from the ground up. And, uh, tell me, what does privacy look like, uh, in an AI age where we're told that the more data that we give and the more data that we share, the more personalized these systems are and the better they are? What does that look like from an Apple standpoint?
Yeah, I think, I think you can separate it into two big pieces. One is how these AI systems are trained in the first place, how these models are built. And years ago, uh, to build a reasonable model for a given task, you needed a lot of information exactly targeting that task. And a lot of companies took the shortcut of saying, the quickest way to do that is to gather data from real users, their own personal data, um, performing that task. On the good news side, these models are now so powerful, um, that they've generalized to where they can take on new tasks with relatively little new information. And so, uh, I think it's far less necessary than it had been in the past. And Apple is always, not, we wouldn't take the easy road. If we need data to train, uh, a new model, uh, we're going to license it, or we're going to go create it ourselves. We're going to find a way to do it in a way that never involves using our customers' private information. That's totally now possible. The other thing though, is given powerful AI, we think the most powerful, useful AI is personal. Is if you're going to, uh, if you have someone who's doing a job for you, it helps if they already understand you and what you care about and what your relationships are, uh, what you're currently doing, uh, what your calendar says, you know, what messages you've just received, all of those things. And there are some wildly different versions of how that's done. Um, most of the industry says the way to do that is to give those companies access to all of that personal information where they can read it. They can use it for a variety of purposes, and then that makes it easy for them to feed that to their AI to do what you ask the AI to do. It also opens the door to all kinds of other problems that are security problems, privacy problems, uh, and so forth. In our case, we believe that that personal intelligence is incredibly important, but you have to architect to make sure that only you and your device that you control is in possession of that information. And so we've gone to great lengths, I think done some really breakthrough work in how we do on-device processing and how we've created even in the cloud, uh, a system we call Private Cloud Compute, that extends that same privacy model that you have in the phone to computation in the cloud, so that you can use powerful AI without giving your data up, without giving it to anyone, including Apple. We think that's central. We think that's the way AI should be built responsibly.
Um, I would love to play something for you.
Oh,
don't worry. No, no, no. It's, it's okay. Um, you know, I recently, I read that you love asking lots of questions. That this is kind of in your DNA. And so I, uh,
Why do you say that? [laughter]
Well, I, I recently had a scammer call me. And they, don't worry, they pretended they were from Google, not Apple. But I asked this scammer a question. I said, they said his name was Scott Landry. It's not his name, but I said to Scott, um, you know, I said, "What do you have on me? Why do I keep getting these calls?" And I just want to play you what he said, especially as we're entering an era where it's easier and easier to get scammed. Okay, so this is me and Scott Landry. See if it plays.
How do you have my info? How do, how are you? And why do I keep getting these calls from folks? Like, I, I genuinely don't understand. Like, is it just that, I guess, like my info is out there?
You're on, um, you're on databases. Yeah, you just got leaked on a database. That's about it. Yeah. You want me to tell you what, what I found you from?
Yeah, sure.
Or what we found you from? So, it's a Bitcoin se. It's like, I don't know what, I don't know what this is in relation to.
Um, you know, you know what that is?
No.
Yeah. You must have signed up for a Bitcoin email, Bitcoin-related email.
Crypto emails. So, like, you know those databases that get.
Does it just have like my email on, or sorry, my email, my phone number? Like, what does it have on it?
Yeah. So, most ones have email, phone number. I've had some where I have social.
Um, great.
Yeah. So, no, your, your social is not, yeah, you're good.
I have, so I have your Gmail. I have your CNN. I have your turner.com.
Um, what's it called? Uh, your expected, like your expected net worth or how much you make a year?
What advice? Why are they calling you people to like protect themselves against you?
Um, it's always evolving. Um, so my, my advice won't be, won't be relevant in a year, in three months. You know, the advice I would have given six months ago isn't relevant now.
Um, there's so many things. Like, there's so many things. I have an, I have an operation currently running. It's the next wave, which is,
[laughter]
No, I can't say that. I can't.
Okay.
Well, I love the fact, Lori, you're the first person who had a scammer calling, you turned into an interview. Uh, I'm absolutely amazed.
Well, you guys are in good. It's good. We do the executives, and we also do the scammers. You know what you did for a living. I mean, if you know a lot about you, I think you should have known that you were an interview.
I did get consent to record him just in case. But I guess my question to y'all is like, you listen to this, our [clears throat] data is everywhere, right? I know that Apple has always been so focused on privacy. So, as AI makes everything even more believable, as the scams are just going to be wild, it took me a second to realize Scott Landry wasn't Scott Landry. And I, you talk about the people you love. What advice do you have as the technology gets better and better? It's almost like we're in a race to some degree.
Well, I think that's, I think that's right. And you know what, uh, Scott Landry had, was clearly the product of data brokers that, as you, if you aren't browsing with a secure browser or aren't using apps that are respecting your privacy, they are exchanging information, uh, between entities. They're building a profile, and that profile becomes the things that people are trading around and can use for all kinds of reasons. Often motivated by putting the right ad in front of you or marketing something to you, but sometimes, uh, something far more nefarious than that. And so we certainly work to build, uh, really great privacy into Safari, great things like App Tracking Transparency as a standard on the App Store, so that your information isn't out there. And I, I honestly don't get calls like this because I have a very small footprint because I'm very private about how, you know, the tools I use and how I browse. And so,
step one is pick, pick the right browser. Uh, pick, pick the, pick the right tools. Be careful where you give your information. Uh, you know, anytime you, you fill out a form for some business, uh, you often, you better trust that business because otherwise they're saying they might see monetary value in trading that. But I think you raise the next level problem, which is where now you'll have not only entities that have all this data on you, but can maybe be an AI that can fake a voice. You know, I mean, the really bad ones, and I've had family members who have fallen prey to scams where someone claims to be their grandchild.
Yeah.
Right. And, "Oh, I'm in trouble. I need you to bail me out." You know, "Don't call Mom and Dad, they'll be so angry with me." But, but, you know, Grandpa, can you come help bail me out of this situation? And when they're pulling on the heartstrings of someone, uh, you know, in that relationship, I think, uh, there are parts of our brain that maybe aren't, you know, that are should be vigilant for the scam are instead thinking, "Oh my gosh, I've got a family member I care about. How can I go help them?" And so I think unfortunately, people like this are going to use every advanced technology they can to prey on people. And so learning your digital literacy and learning, I mean, it's sad to say, but learning a degree of skepticism toward any contact you are having with any entity that you didn't initiate,
um, is, you know, if someone calls up and you weren't the one to call them, or someone sends you an email message and they aren't someone you already have contact with, I think you have to view that as, "Hey, potentially this person isn't who they say they are." Uh, sad state of affairs. But,
I do, I do love the fact, by the way, that we have worked so hard to try to protect people from this. I, I love the fact that you look at Safari on your Mac, it tells you how many trackers, right?
It has blocked on your behalf that I didn't, you didn't have to because data brokers are building a profile on you. And we've always said, look, we're not against advertising, but we want users to have to give consent.
Yeah.
To their information going to somebody else or going to a company different than the one that was asking you for that information. To us, that has been so important, and again, it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. You know, we're not trying to build, you know, Tim has said it, right? That a product's free, it's maybe not free, you're the product, right? And that, and selling the information they gain about you on a free product is how they monetize. That's not us. You know, we want to try to protect you from that. And Craig, he's too humble to say it. He's been really the spiritual, you know, and actual leader in making this happen on behalf of users.
I, um, I'd love, I want to play one more. Lauren is a mom. My name is Lauren from Brooklyn, and I have two kids, one of whom is entering middle school and sort of this new phase of independent life. We're among a cohort of families that wants to delay the smartphone thing for as long as possible. We did get her an Apple Watch, but we did also find ourselves having to deconstruct the smartphone device experience for her. We bought her a digital camera for photos and a refurbished iPod for music on the go. It doesn't really work. I realize I'm probably in a particular bubble here in Brooklyn, but it seems like this trend away from smart technology, especially for kids, but also adults, is really growing. I wonder why Apple, the leader in smart technology, doesn't take advantage of this hole in the market and create dumb, safe products for kids in that transitional time period. We're an Apple family, but if there's another product on the market that allows my kid to listen to music, communicate with people I approve, take photos, and find her way via GPS, I would jump on it. Thank you. Okay. So, will Apple create a dumb phone? Was is the question I, I guess she wanted to know.
Well,
well, I think there's other questions embedded in that, but, uh, I, I think that's a fantastic question, and I, I, I very much relate to what she is saying. Um, good news. Um, we ship such a product. Um, and it is the iPhone. Because what we, what we did announce was it yesterday?
Yesterday. Long week. Yesterday.
It's been a long week. Yesterday. Yes. Exactly. [laughter] What we announced yesterday is we want parents to be able to start when they set up, let's say, a new phone that they want to give a child. Um, when they set it up, the baseline experience is completely focused. It can be focused to the point that what that phone does is lets them call Mom and Dad and Grandma and Grandpa, and that's it. Um, you know, maybe has Find My enabled so the parent, if the parent wants to know where they are. Maybe you've enabled the Books app or the Notes app, your choice, but it starts, we view from starting from the simplest phone, the most, uh, the most basic and, and, uh, simple experience, and then let the parent decide what the time is that's right for their child to open up the set of capabilities, uh, because I, I think today parents feel sometimes, well, gosh, you give the kid the phone and suddenly you just like, thrown them out in the big wide world and everything's going to come rushing in. And we've really shifted, um, the orientation of our child's setup to be start focused and make it really easy and incremental for the parent to make the right judgment for the development of their child and their family's beliefs, uh, over time. And I, I think that's a very healthy way to go. There was, I, I was, it was interesting to be here for that keynote because there was a lot of emphasis on child safety. This was kind of the first, it was really, you know, a kind of an overhaul of quite a bit and doing quite a bit more, um, which I think will be interesting, and I'll be very curious to see because I remember the first, when I interviewed Tim Cook years ago, it was the launch of Screen Time. I blew through those, um, you know, you guys have to do a lot to stop me from using [laughter] my phone, and it did not stop me. So, it seems as though you've learned a lot over the years of how you can actually build not a one-size-fits-all model for people, but, you know, something that different parents can use depending on their child, depending on the age, depending on the category.
That's, that's right. I mean, it's first, it's so important that the parent and the family is the center of, because each, each family is going to be different in this regard. But the other emphasis this year is to make it really easy and natural, uh, for parents, because we had a lot, we've had over time a lot of different tools out there. And in fact, when we go out and explain them to people, often they're like, "Oh my gosh, I didn't actually know that existed on the phone."
Well, that's good and bad. I mean, our job is partly to make sure that,
you didn't have to go and dig in the forums to figure out what you could do to piece together a solution for your child. And so now,
we've tried to make it as easy as possible to get to that easy starting point with your child, and then easy as possible to grow in at the rate that makes sense for the parent.
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Okay, Jaws. So, here's the thing.
Yeah, Lori.
It's, um, your 40th anniversary.
Oh my god. You do your homework, don't you?
That's pretty extraordinary. I mean, and I'm going to ask you an impossible question, but I hope that you can make it possible by answering this question. One of my favorite quotes is a Flannery O'Connor quote. A story is a way to say something that can't be said in any other way, and it takes every word of that story to say what the meaning is. It's really hard to extract a theme, is what clarity of Connor is saying. So, Jaws, I'm going to ask you, um, in honor of your 40th anniversary at Apple, I would love for you to try to extract a theme from your story here.
Wow. Look, I went to Michigan. I know you went to Michigan. Got hired right out of, right out of college. You know, we don't look back a lot. You know, it's just not the Apple way. We don't spend a lot of time being nostalgic. That was something that Steve had kind of, you know, I thought taught all of us, is that the, this industry we're in is a forward-looking industry, not a backward-looking one. But we recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of Apple, a rare time of looking back. I'm celebrating my 40th, so a rare time of looking back. It's weird to feel nostalgic, quite honestly. But my biggest thing is just that Apple has always been, as Craig talked about, making complex things simple, making it personal. And that comes because we have just incredibly amazing people that I just feel incredibly appreciative of the people that we work with because we share this common thought about doing that. You know, it's just amazing how much we jive together, right? It's, uh, you probably heard me say, it's not about being right, it's about doing the right thing. So that rock tumbler, mentality only works if you're willing to change your mind, right? It only works if you're willing to engage and say that we're willing to listen to each other and then say, "Okay, yeah, that way is better than any one of us thought. Let's go do it." And I just feel like I couldn't imagine being, having spent my career anywhere else. Clearly, I couldn't imagine it because here [laughter] I am. But, uh, I couldn't imagine it because this is just such an incredibly special place that does such incredibly special things for the world. And I just feel incredibly blessed to be here. And it's the people. It's the people I work with. It's Craig. It's Turnis. It's Johnny. It's Tim. It's the people that we engage with every day that have this idea of, "Let's create the best possible products, the best possible experience in the world. Damn everything else." You know? And it's, I don't know, is that a theme, Lori? I just,
as someone, well, I guess the theme is people, if I could extract it. And I think, um,
as someone who's spent the last 40 years, um, building products that so many people use, what have you learned about people?
Uh, you, you better have the idea that it is about the product. You know, when Apple was failing, you know, I do tell people, look, I joined in '86, but what happened before '97 kind of doesn't count, right? Because '97 is when Steve came back and the company was literally on the brink of bankruptcy. And Steve came back with the idea that, look, great companies fail because they forget about creating great products, and we are going to make everything we do about the product.
And if we create great products and and if we can tell people why we think they're great and be a good job of both of those, everything else will work out.
And it is turning out to be pretty prophetic, right? Because that was exactly what we put ourselves to. So we want to have people here that are all about the product, not about themselves, you know, it's about the product, it's about the user. And and Ste, you know, Tim always talks about it. Our northstar is is, you know, enriching the lives of our users. And that's literally the conversations we have. What's the right thing to do? What's the right thing to do for the user? And man, that's pretty cool.
I I um I didn't want to bring this up, but I'm going to. Um, so, the year I don't know the year, you're 10 years old. Your mom signs you up for computer class. Oh, wow. Um, and now it feels awkward to say this, but apparently you, Craig, leader of Apple, believed that computers were for posers. This is true. Don't think I don't do my research. I go deep. You know things about Craig. I don't. I go deep.
So, take me to 10-year-old Craig. I know you wanted to be Dr. J, who I This is true, too. Um, who's your idol? Go on, Lori. I'm learning a lot. No, no. Heavy metal, right? I've got a picture of Craig with very long hair, by the way.
What was it about computers that you fell in love with since you were so skeptical? It Well, it it was a cra I mean, honestly, it was a crazy moment. There was an afterschool class uh and my mom heard about it. She's like, "Oh, you should take the computer class." And I literally thought like, "Oh, the kids are doing that. They just want to look cool, you know?" And I mean, I don't know. It's Yeah. Turned out to be very different. Only in California could you be trying to look cool by being a nerd.
So they they filled our our the library of my elementary school had, you know, a dozen Apple twos. Uh and we we filed in there, you know, and they they typing on this thing and there was this moment. I mean, I still remember the program that that we wrote which was like, you know, print how old are you? you know, input A and like in 10 years you will be A+ 10. I ran that thing and my head exploded. Like every neuron was like, "Oh my god, the possibilities." My mom could not What about 20? Can I do 20? Can I do 20? Can I do yeah. I thought the possibilities are limitless. Any number you can put any number in here. Uh it was it it just blew me away and I couldn't stop thinking about it. I couldn't stop talking about it. I started doing all these chores and weeding and you know how household like vacuuming and all this to earn like another couple bucks so eventually I could buy my own computer.
And I I I honestly just never looked back. I don't know what was wrong with me that made that be the one little piece that you know just made the world make sense. Yeah. Uh, but it but it really did. And I if I if I reflect on it, I think, you know, you live in this world of of like miraculous things of of of cars and airplanes and objects and you wonder how they're all built. And I think I felt when I first programmed a computer that I could make something happen, that I that I could build something uh that that was suddenly within within reach and that it was kind of like the the more I learned, the the more I could do. And it was it was interactive. It was there was that sense of of uh you know immediate kind of uh feedback loop of gratification. Uh and once I got on that that in that loop uh it never let me go you know and I I I feel unbelievably blessed for it. I mean I how could how could you not growing up in California happen to be just down the road you know from fundamentally from all of this happening and getting just exposed it at the right moment and and and falling in love with it.
By the way, I will tell you I know that look Craig is a good friend and even though he's the chief of all the software engineering here, as you said, he still loves to code. You know, he still was going to ask you now what happens now that AI is coding everything. What happened to your hobby?
Yeah, I mean it's I do it's it's been my habit on vacation uh often over Thanksgiving or Christmas or so forth. Uh that that those are those are coding vacations. That's where I I get to go build these hobby projects. And over, you know, the the last decade, that's I've been doing it the old-fashioned way, you know, using uh often after WWDC, we announce a whole bunch of APIs and new language features. And so I go kick the tires on all of those and have a lot of fun. Um, and now it's AI. And honestly, over the last year, I've just been that much more ambitious. You know, I it's I I think there there's a sense that like if you if you were someone who was an interior designer and in the past, you know, you had to pound the nail on every little bit of the cabinet that you were building and there was part of that you could take some pride that you you knew how to do that really well and you could get that joint just right, but you know, how ambitious a remodel could you do if that's how you were going to do it? And now you have AI to do a lot of that and you can think bigger about the big picture of the design you're creating. you can try more things out. And so right now, while while a lot of us in the field are partly like, wow, what does this all mean to us, there's a tremendous sense of excitement about how much more we can imagine and and explore and build.
I I have to wrap it soon, but I wanted to say when I got into tech and covering tech, it was like 2009, so I mean, I haven't been, you say, as long as y'all. Um, but it felt really punk rock. I was one of the first to get an iPhone uh in college. People thought I was crazy. I love it. Um, and there was this moment because it wasn't cool to go to Wall Street anymore because we had the recession, everything was imploding, but now you could have the app store had launched, the iPhone had come out, now you could have an idea and you could code it into the hands of millions of people. It was such an extraordinary time and there was so much creativity and there was lots of failure, but the stakes didn't feel as high. Now I sit across from tech founders and the stakes feel really really high. Um, and I think about, you know, looking at the Apple garage days and and these moments where just creativity was just bursting everywhere and and the Apple quote of like, you know, think different. How do you think different once you've become the norm? Once you become the mainstay, once you're not punk rock anymore, and I can say that to you because I know that you like to have a metal in punk rock.
Well, I I think it is. I mean, look that that's no one I think is more surprised than we are that to go from being the underdog uh to suddenly find like what what in the heck just happened uh we're we're kind of successful. Um that's weird. it doesn't fit with your self-conception and and you know Jaws tal he's been here 40 years but you look around Apple is unusual and having so many people here that uh have have been here for so long and who who joined this company not because they thought here's here's a rocket ship for you know getting big and and and financial success but because they like building these things they like doing what Apple did and they're the people that are still the the heart and soul of of this company and attracted other like-minded people and so we're still those people, you know, and now we we do get to do harder things, you know, uh we have the the resources to uh you still have to choose, you know, we we Jaws and I get the letters that say like, hey, I guess it's emails and generally not on paper anymore. Occasionally on paper, it's weird when that happens, but you know, they say, hey, Apple, you're so successful. Why don't you do everything? And it turns out you have to pick a few things because even as much as as we have all this capability doing things right takes focus but we have the opportunity Apple to do bigger things right and uh that's still creative and it's still uh exciting and I think more than ever it makes a big difference in the world and and having this opportunity to have that big a a hopefully really positive role in people's lives uh that's incredible. incredibly gratifying.
Yeah, I do. It is interesting is I do take and it is occasional a letter to your point and I hate that. I just rather an email. Uh but you get a lot of emails too about all the things that Apple should do and usually I it's so flattering because it's almost anything that's hard or not great in the world. It's like Apple will you please do it. And it's that it's that affirmation that you guys will know how to do this. You know how to make it people first and personal and easy to use. And I take that as such a such a compliment when they ask us to do those things.
Cool. Thank you guys so much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Great questions. Enjoyed it. Thanks.