After his company earned 20 million users from a sector it once considered a hobby, Apple CEO Tim Cook says the tech firm is continuing to look at ways to build on Apple TV and hints it may be experimenting with updating the way the world watches media.
TV host and journalist Charlie Rose recently welcomed Cook on a PBS broadcast, where the Apple CEO shed light on the thoughts behind some of its new products and discussed the mark Steve Jobs left on the tech industry.
Cook revealed Apple typically plays the long game with its products and services, often releasing features that make more sense when complemented by new offerings down the road. Cook said Apple works on a lot of projects knowing it can't make a success of them all, and TV continues to hold the tech company's interest.
"Think about how much your life has changed, and all the things around you that has changed," said Cook. "And yet TV, when you go in your living room to watch the TV, or wherever it might be, it almost feels like you're rewinding the clock and you've entered a time capsule and you're going backwards. The interface is terrible. I mean, it's awful!"
Further teasing a TV tuneup, Cook stated there are products that haven't leaked into the tech world. There are products that "haven't been rumored about," said Cook.
Talk of an Apple-branded TV set has been floating around, but Cook's cryptic comments kept his toes out of the rumor pool when talking with Rose.
"I don't want to get into what we're doing in the future," Cook said. "We've taken stabs with Apple TV, and Apple TV now has over 20 million users, so it has far exceeded the hobby label that we placed on it. We've added more and more content to it this year, so there's increasingly more things that you can do on there. But this is an area that we continue to look at."
Right now, Apple TV's laudable user base still lags behind Roku. If Apple has a developing plan for TV, Cook said, in the spirit of Jobs' legacy the tech firm would ensure that it would dominate in whatever sector where it planned to expand.
"If you think about the things that Steve stood for at a macro level: he stood for innovation, he stood for the simple, not the complex," said Cook. "He knew that Apple should only enter areas where we could control the primary technology. All of these things are still deep in our company. They're still things that we very much believe."
