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Tim cook insights

Explore a captivating collection of Tim cook’s most profound quotes, reflecting his deep wisdom and unique perspective on life, science, and the universe. Each quote offers timeless inspiration and insight.

So let me be clear: I'm proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.

Android dominates the mobile malware market.

To whom much is given, much is expected. I do believe this. It's embedded in me.

I just want to build great products.

Discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business.

Creativity and innovation are something you can’t flowchart out. Some things you can, and we do, and we’re very disciplined in those areas. But creativity isn’t one of those. A lot of companies have innovation departments, and this is always a sign that something is wrong when you have a VP of innovation or something. You know, put a for-sale sign on the door.

I'm not targeting government. I'm not saying hey, I'm closing it because I don't want to give you any data. I'm saying that to protect out customers, we have to encrypt. And a side affect of that is, I don't have the data.

Gaming has kind of evolved a bit. More people play on portable devices. Where we might go in the future, we'll see. Customers love games. I'm not interested in being in the console business in what is thought of as traditional gaming. But Apple is a big player today and things in the future will only make that bigger.

I am who I am, and I'm focused on that, and being a great CEO of Apple.

We do a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive. We want to leave the world better than we found it.

It is possible to be aware of God at all times.

It's clear why hacking communities are [growing]. Because it's like, there's a lot more gold there. There's a lot more to steal than ever before.

The worst thing in the world that can happen to you if you're an engineer that has given his life to something is for someone to rip it off and put their name to it.

I remember what it was like to grow up in the South in the 1960s and 1970s. Discrimination isn’t something that’s easy to oppose. It doesn’t always stare you in the face. It moves in the shadows. And sometimes it shrouds itself within the very laws meant to protect us.

I learned that focus is key. Not just in your running a company, but in your personal life as well.

I believe that if you took privacy and you said, I'm willing to give up all of my privacy to be secure. So you weighted it as a zero. My own view is that encryption is a much better, much better world. And I'm not the only person that thinks that.

An acorn would never brag about giving shade.

If I'm working with you for several months on things, if I have a relationship with you, and I decide one day I'm going to sue you, I'm a country boy at the end of the day. I'm going to pick up the phone and tell you I'm going to sue you.

From an app point of view, if you looked at innovation on the PC, you'd be hard pressed to find companies innovating. The list is small.

Everybody doesn't want to have to be a computer scientist to protect themselves. Most people have no desire to do that.

Never try to fix other people. God does not need to do a bank shot off your lips.

Our competition is different. They're confused. They chased after netbooks. Now they're trying to make PCs into tablets and tablets into PCs. Who knows what they'll do next?

I don’t consider myself an activist, but I realize how much I’ve benefited from the sacrifice of others. So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.

In the long arc of time, you are only relevant if customers love you.

I think that [there is] this fundamental right to privacy and the philosophy that government shouldn't be intrusive.

The reality is that if you - let's say you just pulled encryption. Let's ban it. Let's you and I ban it tomorrow. And so we sit in Congress and we say, thou shalt not have encryption. What happens then? Well, I would argue that the bad guys will use encryption from non-American companies, because they're pretty smart.

I despise politics. There is no room for it in a company. My life is going to be way too short to deal with that.

When I go into my living room and turn on the TV, I feel like I have gone backwards in time by 20 to 30 years. It's an area of intense interest. I can't say more than that.

Anything can change, because the smartphone revolution is still in the early stages.

We sold more iPads in the last quarter alone than any PC manufacturer sold in their entire line.

A few years ago, users of Internet services began to realize that when an online service is free, you're not the customer. You're the product.

From our point of view it's important that Apple not be the developer for the world. We can't take all of our energy and all of our care and finish the painting, then have someone else put their name on it.

Excellence has become a habit.

Without encryption, you and I wouldn't be able to do our banking online. We wouldn't be able to buy things online, because your credit cards - they've probably been ripped off anyway, but they would be ripped off left and right every day if there wasn't encryption.

I am driven by great work and seeing people do incredible things and having a part in that.

So I had to figure out for myself what was right and true. It was a search. It was a process. It drew on the moral sense that I'd learned from my parents, and in church, and in my own heart, and led me on my own journey of discovery.

The future of television is what our competitors have been doing for years.

There are times in all of our lives when a reliance on gut or intuition just seems more appropriate - when a particular course of action just feels right.

The reality of today from a cyber security point of view - I think some of the top people predict that the next big war is fought on cyber security.

A great product isn't just a collection of features. It's how it all works together.

Nobody wants to buy sour milk.

I don't own encryption, Apple doesn't own encryption. Encryption, as you know, is everywhere. In fact some of encryption is funded by our government.

Apple is this great American company that could have only happened here.

Apple doesn't do hobbies as a general rule.

Our business is not based on having information about you. You’re not our product. Our product are these, and this watch, and Macs and so forth. And so we run a very different company. I think everyone has to ask, how do companies make their money? Follow the money. And if they’re making money mainly by collecting gobs of personal data, I think you have a right to be worried.

Price is rarely the most important thing. A cheap product might sell some units. Somebody gets it home and they feel great when they pay the money, but then they get it home and use it and the joy is gone.

I don't think Apple has to own a content business.

You can't have a back door that's only for the good guys.

We have three post-PC devices: the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, the revolutionary device that defined a whole new categoryit's outstripping the wildest of predictions.

For the most important decisions in your life, trust your intuition, and then work with everything you have, to prove it right.

What makes Siri cool is she has a personality.

Graduates, your values matter. They are your north star. And work takes on new meaning when you feel you're pointed in the right direction. Otherwise, it's just a job. And life is too short for that.

Today, we are pleased to announce the biggest advancement in iPhone.

You are more powerful than you think.

Since these early days, I have seen and have experienced many types of discrimination and all of them were rooted in the fear of people that were different than the majority.

I am confident our best years lie ahead of us and that together we will continue to make Apple the magical place that it is.

You can only do so many things great, and you should cast aside everything else.

I personally admire Steve Jobs not most for what he did, or what he said, but for what he stood for. The largest lesson I learned from Steve was that the joy in life is in the journey, and I saw him live this every day.

If I'm expected to keep your messages, and everybody else's, then there should be a law that says, you need to keep all of these.

Most business models have focused on self interest instead of user experience. Those are the kinds of problems we solve to solve.

Let your joy be in your journey, not in some distant goal.

In my view the tablet and the PC are different. You can do things with the tablet if you are not encumbered by the legacy of the PC.

People are running huge enterprises off of hacking and stealing data.

You want to be the pebble in the pond that creates the ripples for change.

There’s something very dangerous happening in states across the country. A wave of legislation, introduced in more than two dozen states, would allow people to discriminate against their neighbors.

We're talking about a world where the PC is no longer the center, but just a devicewhere your new devices need to be more portable, more personal.

No matter what you do next, the world needs your energy, your passion, your impatience for progress. Don't shrink from risk. And tune out those critics and cynics. History rarely yields to one person, but think, and never forget, what happens when it does. That can be you. That should be you. That must be you.

Life is fragile. We're not guaranteed a tomorrow so give it everything you've got.

In the world of cyber security, the last thing you want is to have a target painted on you.

The sidelines are not where you want to live your life. The world needs you in the arena!

Apple Stores Offer the Best Buying Experience and Customer Service On The Planet

Honestly, we’ll compete with everybody. I love competition. As long as people invent their own stuff, I love competition.

I love museums. But I don't want to live in one.

The iPad is the clearest expression of our vision of the future of personal computing.

We are the most focused company that I know of or have read of or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day. We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose.....It's not just saying yes to the right products, it's saying no to many products that are good ideas, but just not nearly as good as the other ones.

We're very simple people at Apple. We focus on making the world's best products and enriching people's lives.

If those of us in positions of responsibility fail to do everything in our power to protect the right of privacy, we risk something far more valuable than money. We risk our way of life.

The longer the meeting, the less is accomplished.

The reality is, is that we love competition, at Apple. We think it makes us all better. But we want people to invent their own stuff.

We have to make sure, at Apple, that we stay true to focus, laser focus - we know we can only do great things a few times, only on a few products.

If I know what your messages are, if I can read those, I'll probably be able to conclude where you're going, who you're with, the location the message was sent.

Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being.

There's a mountain of information about us. I mean there's so much. Anyway, I'm not an intelligence person. But I just look at it and it's a mountain of data.

Eighty percent of our revenues are from products that didn’t exist 60 days ago. Is there any other company that would do that?

And that's what everyone at Apple is focused on - pushing forward and creating the future.

Our whole goal in life is to give you something you didn’t know you wanted and then once you get it, you can’t imagine your life without it… and you can count on apple doing that.

Security isn't just a feature, it's a base, it's a fundamental, right.

Companies that get confused, that think their goal is revenue or stock price or something. You have to focus on the things that lead to those.

Creativity is people who care enough to keep thinking about something until they find the simplest way to do it.

We pave the sunlit path toward justice together, brick by brick. This is my brick.

If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock.

While our team managed the manufacturing ramp better than ever before, we could have sold many more iPhones with greater supply and we are working hard to fill orders as quickly as possible.

I think anything can be forced to converge. The problem is that products are about tradeoffs, and you begin to make tradeoffs to the point where what you have left at the end of the day doesn't please anyone. You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user.

Apple Watch is the most personal device we've ever created.

Apple Pay is forever changing the way we pay for things.

That brings us to iPad. We think the iPad is the poster-child of the post-PC world.

I'd rather Apple cannibalize Apple than somebody else cannibalize Apple.

Those who try to achieve success without hard work ultimately deceive themselves-or worse-deceive others.

I'm speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information. They're gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that's wrong. And it's not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.

Siri has proven to us that people want to relate to the phone in a different way.

I dont consider the bloody ROI.

I've always hated litigation, and I continue to hate it.

Intuition is critical in virtually everything you do. But, without relentless preparation and execution, it is meaningless.

We're putting all of our energy into making it right. And we have already had several software updates. We've got a huge plan to make it even better. It will get better and better over time. We screwed up. That's the fact.

We make the best phone, we don't make the most phones.

Maybe law enforcement would like the ability to turn on the camera on your Mac.

America is always stronger when we do things together.

I think two people with strong points of view can appreciate each other even more.

If you're worried about messaging, people will just move to something else. You know if you legislate against Facebook and Apple and Google and whatever else in the US, they'll just use something else. So are we really safer then? I would say no. I would say we're less safe, because now we've opened up all of the infrastructure for people to go wacko at.

You can focus on things that are barriers or you can focus on scaling the wall or redefining the problem.

Certainly some things that are very good can sometimes be used in a bad way.

Apple has a culture of excellence that is, I think, so unique and so special. I'm not going to witness or permit the change of it.

When I think of civil liberties I think of the founding principles of the country. The freedoms that are in the First Amendment. But also the fundamental right to privacy.

The iPad remains Apple's second bestselling product - all the more reason why the iPad Pro needs to be "big" in every sense of the word.

Right to privacy is really important. You pull that brick out and another and pretty soon the house falls.

No one should have a key that turns a billion locks. It shouldn't exist.

There's a lot of health information available on your smart phone. There's financial information. There's your conversations, there's business secrets. There's an enormous long list of things that there's probably more information about you on here than exists in your home, right. Which makes it a lot more valuable to all the bad guys out there.

My business is not reading your messages. I don't have a business doing that. And it's against my values to do that. I don't want to read your private stuff.

The government should always be the one defending civil liberties.

Our new watches are made entirely of double super gold. They are just a piece of gold that you can wear to the left, right, or directly on top of the other gold you own.

Our message, to people around the country and around the world, is this: Apple is open. Open to everyone, regardless of where they come from, what they look like, how they worship or who they love.

Televisions are devices with screens that things appear on.

I don't really think anything Microsoft does puts pressure on Apple.

We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us.

It's the privilege of a lifetime for me to work with the most innovative people on Earth.