Apple CEO Tim Cook was a guest on the most popular morning TV talk show, Good Morning America yesterday. He discussed the new iPhone range, the Apple Watch Series 4 and Apple’s part exemption from President Trump’s latest proposed tariffs on Chinese products.
Host Robin Roberts opened with the cost factor on the iPhone XS and XS Max with the latter becoming Apple’s most expensive iPhone to date at $1,449 for the 512GB model. Cook said that monthly carrier payment plans helped spread the cost of the iPhone and make it easier on the pocket.
Apple for breakfast
He made the point that all the premium quality in the iPhone that replaces separate devices such as MP3 players or digital cameras require each smartphone to be priced at a premium. He also reiterated Apple’s desire to “serve everyone”, which he mentioned in his round of interviews last week:
Roberts: “One model starts at almost $1,100, are you afraid that a group of people are being priced out?”
Cook: “Well we want to make an iPhone for everyone, that’s always been our objective and we’ve got several iPhones in the line and they go down to materially lower. But if you look at this phone, it’s the most advanced iPhone we’ve ever done.
“The way most people pay for these…they do a deal with a carrier and they pay so much per month, so if you look at even the phone that’s priced over $1,000, most people pay $30 a month for it, so that’s about $1 a day. And so if you look at it, the phone has replaced your digital camera…it’s replaced your video camera, it’s replaced your music player, it’s replaced all of these different devices. And so arguably the product is really important and we found people want to have the most innovative product available, and…it’s not cheap to do that.”
Not Tariffic
Cook then discussed the US/China tariff showdown explaining that while the iPhone is assembled in China, parts of the device come from all over the world, including the US.
He said: “The glass comes from Kentucky, there are chips that come from the US and of course the research and development is all done in the United States. I don’t want to speak for them, but I think they looked at this and said that it’s not really great for the United States to put a tariff on those type of products.”
Roberts then turned to Apple becoming the world’s only trillion dollar publicy traded company. Cook said from his point of view Apple could only have been created in America and as such he and his executives feel a responsibility to help the country thrive, including creating jobs and encouraging coding in public schools.
“We do that in terms of creating jobs. We’ve created two million jobs in America. We want to create even more, we’re investing $350 billion in the country over the next five years and we’re starting up facilities in a number of different places. We’re really proud of that contribution, but we want to do more.”
The full interview is on Good Morning America’s Twitter account which also includes discussion on the new iPhone’s camera, Memoji and the Apple Watch Series 4 including the ECG monitor and fall detection.