Tim Cook on why Apple’s huge bets will pay off

He reads email, reviews overnight sales reports and studies countries where numbers are changing to keep his finger on the pulse of the business. Then he puts the phone away. It’s time to get his own pulse up. During his workout, which he records on his Apple Watch, classic rock pounds through his AirPods. At the office, he switches to his MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and iMac. On the road, he travels with his iPad Pro. “Every day," he says, “every product."

But for the past year, Cook has been using two other products that wouldn’t exist if not for two of the most consequential bets that a company worth trillions of dollars has ever made.

They are the latest technological innovations to emerge from a patch of land in Cupertino, California, that, over the past half-century, have reshaped the world and come to rule our lives. The iPhone alone generates more money per year than America’s biggest bank and still accounts for only half of Apple’s revenue, with the rest coming from desktops, laptops, tablets, headphones, watches, streaming movies, TV and music and all the other hardware, software, products and services that Tim Cook uses from the second he wakes until the moment he falls asleep.

There is one idea that encapsulates the approach to innovation that makes all of it possible—and it’s maybe the closest thing to a grand unified theory of Apple. It’s a philosophy of just four words that describe Apple’s past, present and definitely its future. Four words that help explain why this was the year the company plowed into spatial computing and artificial intelligence. During one of those epochal years when it feels like everything is about to change again, I heard them over and over, in conversation with Apple executives and Cook himself: Not first, but best.

Cook elaborated on those four words in a lengthy interview this summer at Caffè Macs on Apple’s campus, where the steady and typically reserved CEO explained that his company’s top priority is delivering great products that enrich people’s lives.

“We’re perfectly fine with not being first," he says. “As it turns out, it takes a while to get it really great. It takes a lot of iteration. It takes worrying about every detail. Sometimes, it takes a little longer to do that. We would rather come out with that kind of product and that kind of contribution to people versus running to get something out first. If we can do both, that’s fantastic. But if we can only do one, there’s no doubt around here. If you talk to 100 people, 100 of them would tell you: It’s about being the best."

COOK HAS BEEN THE CEO of Apple longer than he’s been anything else in his career. But 13 years since he found himself in the unenviable position of following Steve Jobs, he still gets nervous on big days, like the day Wall Street declared was bigger than any since the birth of the iPhone and the biggest day in Cook’s time running the company.

As visitors descended on a glistening Apple Park in June for the annual Worldwide Developers Conference, the weather felt like it had been designed by Apple. The first car I spotted on campus, a red Tesla, had the license plate VISNPRO. Only a few months earlier, Apple had unveiled a sleek headset for spatial computing, the Vision Pro, a gadget that makes you feel like you’ve been transported to the future. Now the company was introducing something no less ambitious.

Cook bounded onto the stage to a roar. He may not match Jobs’s showmanship, but he’s a rock star at this event. After greeting the crowd, Cook took his seat in a corner of the front row as a parade of executives showed off Apple Intelligence, the feature that everyone was there to see. It can summarize your notifications. It can proofread an email you’ve written, or rewrite it to make it friendly, professional or concise. It can also generate custom emojis. And it had the clever effect of rebranding a tantalizing but completely terrifying notion as something more familiar and comforting, not artificial intelligence but Apple Intelligence. Cook likes to say that it’s AI for the rest of us.

“We weren’t the first to do intelligence," he says. “But we’ve done it in a way that we think is the best for the customer."

Including one customer who happens to run the company. Until recently, Cook read long emails. Now he relies on Apple Intelligence summaries. “If I can save time here and there," he says, “it adds up to something significant across a day, a week, a month." Even before Apple Intelligence was released, it changed his productivity and daily habits. “It’s changed my life," he says. “It really has."

But how much will it change his business?

Every second of the day, Apple sells another seven iPhones. In the time it took you to read this sentence, it just sold a few more. And now a few more. Which is surprising, because the iPhone has become so powerful and durable that you don’t have to buy a new one every year. In fact, I’m writing this sentence on an iPhone 11 bought five years ago. (“It’s time to upgrade," Cook tells me.) The computers we hold in our hands have gotten better, but incrementally, not so obviously that you have to buy the next one—until now. Or at least that’s the pitch attached to Apple Intelligence. If you have an iPhone like mine, anything older than an iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max, the only way to add the software that has changed Tim Cook’s life is to buy a newer model.

I asked Cook if he believes Apple Intelligence will make the experience of using his company’s products fundamentally different, slightly different—or not at all different.

“Profoundly different," he said.

He puts Apple Intelligence in the same pantheon of innovative breakthroughs as the iPod’s click wheel and the iPhone’s touch interface. “I think we’ll look back and it will be one of these air pockets that happened to get you on a different technology curve," he says.

To put it another way, he believes what’s happening to him will happen for everyone. For some, it will happen very soon. For others, it will happen later. “But it will happen," he says. “It will happen for all of us."

The day after Cook officially ushered in this new era, Apple gained more than $200 billion in value. It was the single most lucrative day in the history of the company.

I LOVE the emerging world," Tim Cook says. “I love the idea for a bunch of people to feel like tomorrow is better than today—the dream, the belief that you’re going to stand on your parents’ shoulders."

Tomorrow is better than today. To understand Cook, you have to understand that he truly believes this. It’s a deeply American idea, he says, though it’s no longer exclusively American. He finds it in every corner of the world. “There may not be a more important philosophy in life," he says. “I think it’s something we all need to hold onto—and not only hold onto it, but feel accountable for passing it on."

He would know. Before the 45th president of the United States called him Tim Apple, Cook grew up in the small town of Robertsdale, Alabama. Neither of his parents went to college. As a child, he set his mind to attending Auburn University, where he studied industrial engineering, watched football and learned to ask lots of questions.

“I’ve gone from believing that if you ask questions, it meant you’re fundamentally not smart, to believing that the more you ask, the more curious you are, the smarter you get," he says.

He worked at IBM and Compaq and developed such a reputation for supply-chain and logistics expertise that in early 1998, Apple called. The rational thing to do was hang up. The year before, the company had lost more than a billion dollars. But he listened to his intuition and took the meeting with Jobs. Within minutes, he knew he wanted to work at Apple.

When he moved to California, Cook lived in a tiny apartment, drove a Honda Accord but preferred his bicycle and subsisted on chicken, rice and steamed vegetables. At Apple, he reinvented the company’s supply chain, modernizing logistics and transforming a mediocre operations team into a machine. He was promoted to chief operating officer in 2005 and elevated to chief executive officer in August 2011. That October, on the day of his first major event as CEO, Cook went to Jobs’s home to say goodbye. One of Jobs’s last pieces of advice for his successor was to not ask what he would do—and just do what was right. He died the next day.

It was only natural to wonder if Apple could survive without Jobs. But under Cook, the company matured into something more predictable, maybe a bit less magical, but a whole lot more valuable.

On the day I met him in Caffè Macs, nothing about the executive’s appearance suggested that he was someone who could utter a single word and seriously dent the global economy. One of the most powerful men on the planet wore a plain polo shirt, casual jeans, and sneakers and glasses made by Nike.

Even today, Cook, who turns 64 in November, has maintained his privacy to the point that the public doesn’t know much about him. That his favorite escape is hiking the national parks. That he drinks Diet Mountain Dew, though not as much as he once did, because Apple doesn’t stock his favorite soda. That he follows Duke basketball and Auburn football so closely that this summer he was monitoring the Denver Broncos’ starting quarterback competition between two Auburn alumni. This is how he likes it. A decade ago, when he came out as the first gay CEO of a major company, Cook said that he prefers to keep the attention on Apple products and their impact on customers’ lives.

With that in mind, I asked if he ever thinks about what his childhood in Alabama would have been like if it had been filled with those products.

“Yeah, I do," he says quietly. “This was pre-internet, and just the idea that you can find people like you would have been an extraordinary idea at that point in time."

It would have opened up an emerging world with answers to his many questions—a portal beyond a small town where one boy with the belief that tomorrow was better than today was already beginning to think differently.

ONE OF THE PECULIAR THINGS about Apple is how many of its most successful products once appeared to be failures. Maybe you’ve forgotten this, now that it seems crazy anyone thought there wouldn’t be a market for them. Apple’s executives haven’t. They remember when the company was ridiculed for reasons that sound totally ridiculous. The iPhone didn’t have a physical keyboard. The iPod cost $399 when CD players were $39. AirPods looked funny and would fall out of your ears. Who would wear an Apple Watch or use Apple Pay or watch an Apple TV+ show about an American football coach hired by a British soccer team? By now, they’re used to it. “It’s predictable in some ways," Cook says.

Some devices that are now like bodily appendages were underwhelming at first and improved with time. Others were simply ahead of their time. Elsewhere in Silicon Valley, patience has the approval rating of carrier pigeons. But for every product that began slowly, Cook says he was confident it would eventually catch on. “It’s not that people are wrong and we’re right," he says. “We have enough faith that if we love the product, there will be enough other people out there that love it too."

It’s hard for a company that can do so many things to decide what it actually wants to do—and what it can do better than anyone. “The key for us is focus," Cook says, “saying no to really, really good ideas so you can make room for the great ones." But the only thing harder than deciding what to do is doing it. “We’d argue the innovation isn’t having that idea," says Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. “The innovation was being able to craft the right product that you could deliver in a great way at the time."

In other words, innovation is everything that happens after the idea. And at Apple, it happens in a carefully protected area called the Design Studio. When I’m given a tour, opaque white barriers prevent me from peeking at any secret projects in the works. The company’s designers joke that 99 percent of them will never see the light of day. This year, for example, Apple killed plans to build an electric car after spending more than a decade and billions of dollars pursuing one, a costly reminder that Apple products are more likely to fail internally than externally.

Of all the products that made it beyond the area I could not see, the most ambitious to pull off was Vision Pro. There are lots of reasons why a supercomputer disguised as ski goggles is something of a technological miracle. When I spoke with Apple’s leading design minds, they weren’t allowed to tell me most of them. Apple says there are more than 5,000 patents baked into the Vision Pro, which is another way of saying 5,000 limitations that had never been overcome before. To make this sort of product, says Alan Dye, vice president of human interface design, “it takes not only that big idea that might be innovative, but really the hundreds or thousands of innovative thoughts that come after it."

Maybe the most surprising aspect of Vision Pro is how it makes you feel. You might not believe that strapping yourself into a piece of technology could be emotionally overwhelming. But when you experience an ultra-high-resolution spatial photo of your daughter at age 3, or watch an immersive video of a grandparent who’s since died, it’s no longer a headset. It’s a time machine. You put on this device from the future and find yourself reliving the past. You come back to the present and have tears in your eyes.

“That really is why we did this product," says Richard Howarth, vice president of industrial design. “It’s got the ability to do things that the other products can’t do."

There is no killer use case for the Vision Pro yet, so I asked Cook how he’s using it. At work, of course, when he wants several windows open for multitasking. But especially at home. “I’ve always viewed having to sit in a certain place in your living room as really constrained," he says. He prefers to lie flat on the couch, project Ted Lasso and The Morning Show on the ceiling and stare into the Vision Pro. “It’s a lot more pleasant way to watch something than to sit like a statue in front of a TV," he insists.

Jon M. Chu agrees. The director of Wicked grew up in Silicon Valley and bought a Vision Pro the first day it went on sale. From the second he put it on, he knew it would have a dramatic effect on his creative process. “Everyone here laughs at me because I’m so obsessed with it," he says. Jobs once famously described computers as a bicycle for the mind. “I feel like Vision Pro is a rocket ship for the mind," Chu says. “You don’t know where you’re headed, but you get to go someplace and figure it out with everybody."

But that rocket ship is an expensive ride. When the Vision Pro came out this year, mixed reality crashed into the reality that most consumers aren’t ready to shell out $3,500 for a cool toy.

“Over time, everything gets better, and it too will have its course of getting better and better," Cook says. “I think it’s just arguably a success today from an ecosystem-being-built-out point of view."

And from a sales point of view?

“I’d always like to sell more of everything, because ultimately, we want our products to be in as many people’s hands as possible," he says. “And so obviously I’d like to sell more." But there’s a limit to the number of faces this version of the Vision Pro will be on. “At $3,500, it’s not a mass-market product," Cook says. “Right now, it’s an early-adopter product. People who want to have tomorrow’s technology today—that’s who it’s for. Fortunately, there’s enough people who are in that camp that it’s exciting."

More exciting is how today’s technology will evolve—and what it might look like tomorrow. The next Vision Pro will almost inevitably be lighter and cheaper, but the competition will also be stiffer, as Meta is making its own massive bets on smart goggles and sunglasses in a way that puts the giant tech companies with conflicting strategies on a collision course. Then again, Apple has a history of turning uncertainty into ubiquity. If you doubt the Vision Pro, you might be right. Or you might be as wrong as the skeptics who dismissed iPods and iPhones and AirPods. And from the success of the company’s iconic products, Cook learned one more thing.

“It doesn’t occur overnight," he says. “None of these did."

ONE MORNING in September, the Apple Store on New York City’s Fifth Avenue was glowing. Inside the glass cube, the party anthem “Turn Down for What" blasted at 7:57 a.m. as clapping employees waited for the doors to open at 8. There were lines of shoppers outside, excited to be the first people in America to buy the new iPhones—and get their iPhone boxes autographed by Tim Cook.

All of them would make decisions and form habits with their new devices, just as Cook did with his own iPhone. His wallpaper? A photo with his nephew in Grand Teton National Park. His most underrated app? Notes, where he types or dictates thoughts before he forgets them.

The best name of a group chat? He looked at me like I’d asked him to recommend the best Android phone.

“The best—name?" he said. “I don’t name them. Do you name yours? Interesting. I may take that on."

The next time we meet, Cook proudly reports that he’s named the group chat with his college roommates: Roommates.

On the morning of iPhone release day, there were other things on his mind. “You work on something for so many years, and you’re wondering how it will be received," he says. “You never know until you come out with it." Even then, he couldn’t be sure of the reception for Apple Intelligence. At that moment, it was neither first nor best. Despite the sleek “Hello, Apple Intelligence" ads plastered around the store, the iPhone’s most enticing new feature wouldn’t be available for another month, with more updates rolling out next year. But it didn’t seem to bother customers—or Cook. “In the longness of time," he says, “I don’t think it will be even a footnote."

Every night, the last thing Cook does before he goes to bed is set his iPhone alarm for an ungodly hour before 5 a.m. So after our first sit-down interview, I hunted down his email address and sent him a note. We’d never emailed before, and he had no reason to expect this one. I figured it would get lost in a deluge of messages from colleagues and feedback from customers—maybe even filtered to spam.

I scheduled it to send before 5 a.m.

He responded at 5:34 a.m.

The reply was friendly, professional and concise, but it wasn’t written by Apple Intelligence. He tapped it out himself. And then Tim Cook got on with his day.

Because if you believe that tomorrow is better than today, that also means today is going to be better than yesterday.

Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com