The future of Apple
Apple’s Phil Schiller talks hits, delays and the future
Getting the chance to interview tech company executives is pretty cool. On the one hand, you can expect them to be right on message with the company line. On the other, you can expect some insights that others might not be privy to.
And so when I was invited to meet Phil Schiller, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, I went to the London apartment where our meeting was due to take place with some excitement about our rendezvous. Among other things, we talked about the new iMac Pro, Apple’s move into AR, the delay to HomePod and the process to get to iPhone X.
It’s on that latter topic that we begin, with Schiller characteristically enthused. “It’s probably the boldest of the things we’ve done – thinking back to the start when the teams started working on [the device] and made proposals of some of the things we would ultimately do with the technology.
“At the beginning, it seemed almost impossible. Not just almost. It seemed
impossible. And to pull off what feels impossible and make it possible – and not only that, but something we love using – is just a great achievement.
“Clearly there was a point in the process where we had to commit to the fact that it would be a full top-to-bottom screen on the front with no Home button, which means you’re counting on Face ID working as we’d hope, and being as good.
“That’s an exciting moment, when you have to sort of… the old saying: ‘Burn the boats. Leave the past behind, and commit.’ Knowing that the team was
“Our goal is not to be most, but to be the best”
willing to make that gamble was a key point early enough in the process.”
I mention that as a team, we were surprised the learning curve for the iPhone X gestures was unexpectedly short. “One of the things I find is that often with technology, it’s not the first try that tells you and informs you how it’ll be like to live with it, what it means to use it, how well you adapt to it; it’s the first time you set it up as your own. That’s when you really judge: what does this mean?”
“Most people are comfortable with it within minutes – 30 minutes, whatever. It’s not the kind of thing you have to live with for a week or two to get used to. You know, we’ve still got muscle memory sometimes and we might try to do something and we remember, ‘Oh no, that’s not how you do it’ – you want to swipe up on an iPhone 8 or 7, or on an iPad, and no, it doesn’t work that way. That, to me, is always the sign of some or our most advanced, best thought-out technology; they become intuitive incredibly quickly and change how you think about everything else you use.
Schiller acknowledges that Apple “knew what we had” with the Touch ID fingerprint sensor and that it knew what it had created with the Home button through the years. “We knew it was no small thing to decide to replace that.” He adds that Apple believed it could make something people would love in its place, and would have even bigger potential.
I say to Schiller we’ve been surprised at how good Face ID is for Apple Pay. “Yes. That was on a long list of things we knew we had to deliver. The Home button, at the beginning, really did one thing. Maybe two. It woke up your screen, and then it let you go to the Home screen from any app. And then over the years, we’ve layered on many uses – the multitasking capabilities, evoking Siri, you being able to use it for Apple Pay, creating Touch ID. So Face ID had a much harder job for its first version than the Home button had for its first version.”
Apple notoriously doesn’t talk about products in advance (unless it’s the 2018 Mac Pro, when it did), but I asked whether Face ID could appear in more Apple products beyond phones.
“We try not to get ahead of ourselves,” says Schiller with the look of someone who may have been asked this question before. “While we have many plans throughout the year, we also are realists in that we need to create something, and that we need to make it great, and that we need to study, and we need to learn… all the user cases all around the world from everybody in every situation, before we then imagine some of the other things we might do.”
Team spirit
We move on to talk about one of Apple’s main strengths, the relationship between the hardware and software and why that’s vital to Apple as a company. “It’s a very important thing. It’s something we think a lot about. It’s something that we have appreciated about the culture of Apple as a company, and something that we’ve actually worked to enhance as well.
“One of the great things Tim [Cook] has done is to recognise the power of collaborative work at Apple; he encourages us all to really take advantage of that; and to not only work together, but to imagine things in our products that would not be possible had it not been for that collaboration. And those then turn into strengths that, as customers, we all benefit from.
“That simple idea has extended to how you can walk up to your Mac, and it unlocks it from your Watch. It’s actually using very complex, speed-of-light calculations between the internet and your devices to understand proximity and privacy of whose device it is. So it’s very advanced technology, but with a very simple benefit.
“Products [like] AirPods and Pencil could not work were it not for hardware and software and chip teams and radio teams, all working together to make something happen. And I think the latest feature that’s the result of this collaboration is Face ID.
“Other companies certainly have had the vision of ‘Can you unlock something with someone’s face?’ but no one [has] actually delivered technology as advanced and capable and ubiquitous and consumer-friendly as Face ID. And that is the direct result of this collaboration, and how these teams work for years together on a simple powerful idea with all that technology.”
Our discussion progresses onto other products. I had on my list to talk about
AirPods, but Schiller wants to talk in detail about them before I’ve had chance to ask. “So frequently, I talk to customers who say, ‘My favourite product Apple’s made are AirPods.’ And that’s a really nice thing to hear. I love when customers respond that one of their favourite products is something this simple, and yet so much work went into it.
“At the surface level, it’s an incredibly simple product. But the reality is it’s actually an incredibly complex product to make. Each AirPod really is its own computer, running software and hardware. And those two computers need to deliver this very clear experience that you want, and they have to work together, because we’re very attuned to synchronisation in audio as a species.
“One of our favourite features is just the idea that you take it out and the music stops – you put it back in and it keeps going again. Again, that’s a simple idea, but took a lot of engineering to make it work quickly, reliably, for all of us in all different ear sizes and different situations. And they have to work with this iPhone that may be in your pocket or your bag. And as you know, our bodies are big bags of water, which are really
“One of the great things Tim [Cook] has done is to recognise the power of collaborative work at Apple”
bad for radio signals to get through.
“When we designed the AirPods, we were designing them partly with Apple Watch in mind. The idea that you can have, one day, a cellular experience on your watch [with] your AirPods.”
One of the things Apple Watch excels at is fitness tracking, and I suggest to Schiller that we were impressed with how well the AirPods stay in when running with them, even if they’re not fitness headphones per se.
“We all went through the same learning curve, which is: we expect them to not stay in that well. We’re surprised when they do, and then you realise, ‘I had no idea that the cables were having such an effect on how things stay in my ears’ and that when you remove the cable, there’s a bigger difference than we thought – both as a design team and as customers, as we all use them.”
No competition
I move on to talk about the evolving relationship between Mac and iPad Pro. Is the iPad Pro really the PC replacement it was touted as? Or is it rather a supplementary device to the Mac?
“What we’ve learned, truthfully, is that it’s both, and that depends on the user,” says Schiller. “For some people, iPad Pro is a replacement for their computer. Not that you throw away your computer. People don’t do that.
“But that it becomes your primary computing device. The way you mostly hear about this is people say, ‘I use a computer at my desk’ or ‘I use a notebook at my desk, but when I travel, I travel just with my iPad Pro’. It is so great in that situation.
“So for those customers, the iPad has become their primary device, but they don’t think of it in their brains as competing with their previous computer. It’s just the computer they spend the most time with.
“And then there are other customers who augment their computer experience. They use their computer a lot, but they also use an iPad for a task that it is clearly far better for than their computer.
“I think that people love to watch movies on their iPad more than they do on a computer. People like to read on their iPad better than on their computer.
“Depending on what those tasks are, for those customers they’re augmenting. And what we try to do is not tell the customer that either direction is the right or wrong way. It’s almost like they’re making a distinction between the two, even though the uses are overlapping, and one is replacing the other frequently.
“It’s an interesting thing. The words are important. People don’t necessarily like the word ‘replace’ when they’re making these choices. But in reality, they are spending more time with it.”
Schiller is then keen to talk about a related product he’s especially proud of – Apple Pencil – and even returns to it after I ask another question.
number of years ago, when we talked about how we need to move our products forward for pros, we knew we needed to, along with MacBook Pro – and doing a new Mac Pro – meet an iMac need.
“This time, we decided to push it further. We asked our engineering teams, ‘Can you make an iMac Pro that’s truly designed for pros?’ It really, inside, is a completely different computer.
“So why now? Because this is how long it’s taken. It was a big, big project, and that’s just how things go. It takes this time. And we’re getting close to when it’s out there. It’s very soon. A matter of days now.” [The iMac Pro was released shortly after this interview.]
“And like all of our products, we have a lot of thoughts and feelings about it. But the truth will be: what do customers tell us? I can’t wait.
“This is always the most exciting moment of the process. It truly is a whole new product. Nobody’s used it yet in the real world, and they’re about to, and what are we all going to learn? That’s probably one of the most fun moments in any product launch that we have.”
Talking about products that are coming soon, I ask about HomePod and the delay to the launch of the product which was originally slated for this month. Why has there been a pause?
“It’s really very simple: it’s a brand- new product. It’s a lot of engineering to make it be the product we’ve described, and for it to be what we all hope it can be. And I’m actually really proud that we’re a company that will take the time to do something right. Our goal is always not to be ‘most’ but to be ‘best’, and we set high standards. We often exceed those, but not always. And we need to be self-honest if something’s not ready, and continue to work on it until it is.”
Schiller is also frank about AI-driven speakers being still very much a developing product category.
“Nobody really knows how we all want to use these kinds of products. There might not be one product for everybody. And our [focus is] on having great sounding music wherever you place it in your room, or a great interaction with Siri for a music experience – we think that that’s a great [starting] point.
“I think others have different
perspectives on the things that they’re making, and we’re all going to learn together what we think.”
We move on to where Apple’s recent focus on AR might lead.
“We’ve been talking about augmented reality for a while – about a year. We did a lot of work understanding both VR and AR. We know there is a place in the world for both technologies, but of the two, augmented reality is perhaps the greatest opportunity to change how we use technology and how we do many tasks in our lives.
“We think it’s the most ubiquitous technology in front of us; we’re at the beginning of this gigantic curve that’s going to happen. So this is pretty thrilling. We can probably talk for hours about what it could be, but the truth is, nobody knows. And that’s the fun of it.
“We believe that, with the fullness of time, augmented reality has that opportunity to transform most of everything we do with technology.
“It helps how you visualise and work with products and technologies. [The IKEA Place app] is a great early example of how you can visualise furniture in your living room, not just something in a showroom. It’s the stuff of science fiction. We’ve seen it in movies, and now we get to actually hold it in our hands.”
“The truth is, [AR games] began before we released ARKit, with Pokémon Go. That was a beginning form of augmented reality with great universal appeal. Now with ARKit, they can make a much better version of it, and they’re hard at work at that. There’s just an endless list of things, but the truth is, it’s going to change more things than we can imagine right now.”
Smart HomeKit
With time closing in on us, we focused on HomeKit, Apple’s smart home control protocol built into Siri and iOS, which we’re hearing more and more about as the smart home market explodes. Home automation has been talked about for a long time (Schiller acknowledges this with a smile), and a lot of the solutions haven’t been very elegant. Why is now the right time to release and push HomeKit?
“To do [this], takes time,” muses Schiller. It’s inevitable that we will walk into our homes and say something and the lights come on without having to search around for a light switch, or ask for the heat to be turned down when it gets too hot, or turn on your TV and watch a show. This isn’t in question. I think everyone accepts we’re on a path here together as a world to get there. “We believe the correct way to do voice control is with an understanding of the user’s attention, not the user being trained to memorise commands. So for us, with Siri, that means we have to develop [its] knowledge so that developers can create the products – the light switches, the heating controls and the home security system and all that you need – without having to, themselves, create the artificial intelligence. That’s on us, as the platform creator, to do. “All of that foundational work has been going on for more than a year now, and it starts to result in more and more products that are coming to market to support that. And it’s the beginning of the first builders across Europe to start to build homes that have it in from the beginning for the buyer – which I think is a great sign of the progress that we’re making towards the goal that we all want. “So yeah, we believe in HomeKit. We believe in building an intelligent home. That’s part of the ecosystem of our products, and it works together with them in an intuitive and safe way.” I’ve got plenty more to ask but, with that, our interview ends. Schiller has left me with plenty to muse on, anticipate and speculate over. But he also left me with one overriding feeling - that above all else this is a guy who’s incredibly passionate about the hardware and software Apple creates.
“We think AR is the most ubiquitous technology in front of us”