The Apple Watch isn’t the first smartwatch to hit the market, but Apple CEO Tim Cook is confident that it will be the first smartwatch that actually matters. iMore has a full transcript of Tim Cook’s talk at Goldman Sachs on Tuesday and it shows that Cook thinks Apple has history on its side when it comes to establishing new markets in the tech world.
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In particular, Cook noted that Apple was technically “late” to the market for MP3 players but that didn’t stop the company from dominating it all the same.
“The MP3 industry, before the iPod — we weren’t the first company to make an MP3 [player],” Cook said. “There were lots of companies in the… you may not be able to remember that, but there were lots of them out there. They weren’t used very much. They were fundamentally too hard to use, and the user interface was really bad. You almost needed a PhD to use these. They weren’t, they’re not memorable. They didn’t really move the dial.”
Cook sees a similar situation with the smartwatch market — he doesn’t think any smartwatches that have been released so far are all that memorable and he thinks Apple will once again be able to set the bar for the market.
“There are several things that are called ‘smart watches’ that are shipping, but I’m not sure you could name any,” Cook explained. “Certainly there’s been none that have changed the way people live their lives…At Apple, that’s our objective: We want to change the way you live your life. And just like this iPad has changed the way you work, and hopefully the way you live, and the iPhone has done that, we see the Apple Watch doing that.”
Whether the Apple Watch will be truly “life changing” is still up for debate, of course, and we likely won’t know its true impact for at least another year of so.
Check out Cook’s full remarks at Tuesday’s Goldman Sachs event by clicking here.
