Tim Cook: I’m fine with people buying fewer iPhones

Apple CEO is happy that many customers keep their current iPhone longer and are less likely to buy a new one. “The most important thing is that they are satisfied,” he says in an interview. “Because then they will buy a new iPhone next time.”

Cook says in the interview with CNBC that the goal is to make the services and ecosystem around iPhones thrive. “A lot of people misunderstand Apple’s story,” the CEO said. “For example, many people consider how many iPhones we sell in a 90-day period to be the most important metric. That’s very low on my list of priorities.”

Instead, it’s about customer satisfaction, numbers that Apple uses extensively during keynotes. “If they decide to buy a new phone later, or if they feel that the campaign to replace the battery at a cheaper rate than usual will help them get back on track, I’m fine with that.” Cook refers to Apple’s response to secretly slowing down iPhones to limit battery loss. Apple has had iPhone users replaced batteries throughout 2018 for 29 euros instead of the usual 89 euros. Apple cited the move last week as one of the reasons why iPhone sales are disappointing.

The Apple ecosystem now contains 1.4 billion active devices, Cook said. According to him, there are 500 million devices with digital assistant Siri active, with users accessing Siri ten billion times a month. It can be deduced from this that users use Siri on average twenty times a month.

Cook also discussed various other developments around Apple in the interview. For example, he claims that the company has not been in talks in recent months to reach a settlement with Qualcomm, with whom Apple is involved in a patent battle. Cook also claims that sales of both the Apple Watch and AirPods are four to six times higher than the iPod in the same period after its initial release. This is partly due to the fact that the iPod’s popularity was limited in the early years, because the MP3 player required a Mac to sync. The bulk of the sales only came after an iTunes client for Windows appeared in late 2003.