Apple CEO Tim Cook Praises 'Phenomenal' Business in China

In a recent interview, Apple CEO Tim Cook praised China and Apple’s “phenomenal” growth in the communist country in recent years.

MacRumors reports that in a recent interview with He Shijie, a senior at a Beijing University, Apple CEO Tim Cook praised China and its technological advances. Cook noted that Apple takes much of its inspiration and product designs from feedback from Chinese users before rolling these changes out to the rest of the world.

Cook stated that strong diversity was one of the reasons that Apple continues to release new and updated products every year, stating:

What we do is we have a culture of creativity and a culture of collaboration. And these two things together, when they intersect, create enormous innovation. You put people together that have different skills, that look at the world differently, maybe they’re from different places, they have different backgrounds. Some are hardware, some are software. Some are services. Some may be musicians and artists. But you put them all together on a common purpose, to design an incredible product, and it is amazing what can come out of it.

China is a huge market for Apple, in Q4 of 2020 the company reported that iPhone 12 sales in China hit 18 million units, with Cook calling the response “phenomenal” earlier last month.

Shijie asked Cook about where any of Apple’s newly introduced iPhone features are based on Chinese customer feedback. Cook stated that they were and listed a few including iOS 13 dark mode, QR readers, and 5G. Cook stated:

There’s a ton of features there that are. Whether it’s specific keyboards, whether it’s QR Code mode. 5G in a lot of ways was energized in China because China is so far ahead in the coverage model for 5G. Junction view in Maps because of the complex intersections and so forth. Night mode was another one where the inspiration for Night Mode came from China. And so we listen very carefully to our customers there and wind up creating things based on that, that is then given to the world. We get a lot of feedback from China.