Tim Cook: Apple is Closer Than Ever to Releasing New Products

For the naysayers, Apple’s second fiscal quarter of 2014 was a shakeup: the company isn’t in decline, and this is the message Tim Cook transmits to all in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

Fact is, analysts have been impressed by the quarterly earnings announced yesterday, as Apple’s stock price is up 7.78%, and the majority of Wall Street analysts have rated the stock as a strong buy.

Tim Cook also knows that all eyes are on Apple: while letting slip that Apple is hard at work on new products, he also adds that the company won’t rush things, because it wants to get it right.

You want to take the time to get it right. Our objective has never been to be first. It’s to be the best. To do things really well, it takes time. You can see a lot of products that have been brought to market where the thinking isn’t really deep and, as a consequence, these things don’t do very well. We don’t do very many things so we spend a lot of time on every detail and that part of Apple isn’t changing. It’s the way we’ve operated for years and it’s the way we still operate. I feel great about what we’ve got coming. Really great and it’s closer than it’s ever been.

As he suggested, new products aren’t just hardware. Now, considering the recent rumours of Apple interviewing high-profile payments industry experts, this obviously raises the question of whether it will be mobile payments. Tim Cook doesn’t deny that’s an interesting area, especially now that the iTunes Store has about 800 million active accounts.

I think it’s a really interesting area. We have almost 800 million iTunes accounts and the majority of those have credit cards behind them. We already have people using Touch ID to buy things across our store, so it’s an area of interest to us. And it’s an area where nobody has figured it out yet. I realize that there are some companies playing in it, but you still have a wallet in your back pocket and I do too which probably means it hasn’t been figured out just yet.