For a company that sells a lot of PCs, Apple has a pretty pessimistic outlook on the category. In an interview with The Telegraph published Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook foresaw the end of the PC era, but also touched on a variety of other topics, including encryption, Apple Watch sales and the possibility of the company making an entirely new medical device.
“I think if you’re looking at a PC, why would you buy a PC anymore,” Cook said. Granted, he’s promoting the iPad Pro, which, with its all-new smart keyboard and pencil, is a laptop replacement in many cases. But one has to wonder what that means for Apple’s Mac and MacBook categories, with which the company had good success in the last two years.
Cook doesn’t really care much, as long as Apple is stealing from itself. Speaking about the iPad mini, he said it “clearly created some cannibalization” but, as long as the company cannibalizes itself, it’s “fine.”
Cook still wouldn’t divulge the exact sales figures for the Apple Watch, but he did say the device is bound to set a new sales record this quarter. He also pointed out the Watch’s health benefits; and even though Apple doesn’t plan to position the Watch as a purely health product, the company might be launching an “adjacent” product of unspecified nature. “Maybe an app, maybe something else,” Cook said.
Things are good in Apple TV land as well, where Apple saw “extremely strong” early sales, and a large number of apps developed for Apple TV’s new platform, tvOS.
Finally, Cook touched on the subject of encryption, a hot topic due to an ongoing case in which the U.S. Justice Department wants Apple to decrypt a locked iPhone. Warning that “any backdoor is a backdoor for everyone,” Cook once again said he believes end-to-end encryption is the best way to protect its customers’ privacy.
“If you halt or weaken encryption, the people that you hurt are not the folks that want to do bad things. It’s the good people. The other people know where to go,” he said.