Apple chief executive Tim Cook says there are still “not enough women at the table” at the world’s tech firms – including his own.
In an exclusive interview with the BBC, Mr Cook said technology “will not achieve nearly what it could achieve” without a more diverse workforce.
He said there were “no good excuses” for the lack of women in the sector.
He also said he thought Augmented Reality (AR), and the concept of the Metaverse, were “profound.”
“In the future people will wonder how we lived without AR,” he says. “We’re investing a tonne in that space.”
Augmented Reality is a mixture of digital content and the real world – a very simple example might be using the phone on your camera to insert virtual furniture before you buy it, to see how it might look in your house.
I met Tim Cook during his first visit to the UK since the pandemic.
In person, the boss of the world’s richest company is affable, polite and thoughtful.
He’s softly spoken, and was dressed in his trademark dark clothes. He wasn’t big on small talk, although we joked about the British weather, and he offered his condolences on the death of the Queen.
Mr Cook told me he is “not a great role model” for work-life balance and that it isn’t a phrase he associates with himself.
“There’s little distinction between personal and work, they blend,” he says.He adds that he tries to “compartmentalise” issues that are outside of his control. “I realise that they’re there… but I don’t obsess with it,” he says.
He was fascinated by my BBC audio recorder and turned it over in his hands a few times once we had finished our interview.
I confessed that I’d had to ask his colleagues if I could borrow some wired headphones to plug into it – Apple largely ditched the headphone socket from its iPhones in 2016, in favour of wireless in-ear AirPods.
“Oh we still sell those,” he said seriously of the wired pair hanging from my ears. “People still buy them.”
He was keen to talk to me about another subject close to his heart – diversity.
