Tim Cook on Apple Watch: “You’re going to wind up charging it daily”

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Apple CEO Tim Cook doesn’t grant many interviews, so when he does take the hot seat there’s always a lot of interest in what he has to say.

In this case – an on-stage grilling at the Wall Street Journal’s global tech conference – Cook spoke about the upcoming Apple Watch’s battery life, Apple Pay, the company’s plans to reinvent television and its attitude to customer privacy.

Apple has been cagey on the subject of the Watch’s battery until now, with most pundits suggesting the company was still looking for a way to extend it, but it seems they’ve settled on it lasting a day per charge. Cook told the WSJ’s Gerard Baker, “We think people are going to use it so much you will end up charging it daily”. Some might find that a little short, we suspect – after all, you generally wear a watch all day so you can, y’know, find out the time.

Time for TV?

Cook also confirmed that Apple has plans for television. He said of the current experience of watching TV, “We’re living in the 1970s” and that Apple recognised that there’s “a lot to be done in this area”. Of course, he was reluctant to say more than that, but the suggestion is that the company is looking at sparking a top-down revolution in the way TV programming is sold and consumed – doing for telly what iTunes did for music retail and playback, perhaps?

He spoke a little about Apple Pay and some consumers’ concerns regarding security and privacy. He said Apple Pay was “more secure” than traditional credit cards and that shoppers would embrace it because it’s a “pain in the butt” to have to replace cards that are compromised or cloned.

He also said that Apple Pay wouldn’t be tracking your purchases in order to better target you with ads in the future (oh hey, Google!): “We don’t want to know what you buy, we’re not into collecting data, we’re not Big Brother. We’ll leave that to others.” Cook went on to say that Apple does not read users’ iMessages and designed the service specifically for privacy.

[Source: WSJ]

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Tech journalism's answer to The Littlest Hobo, I've written for a host of titles and lived in three different countries in my 15 years-plus as a freelancer. But I've always come back home to Stuff eventually, where I specialise in writing about cameras, streaming services and being tragically addicted to Destiny.