14 DAY TRIAL // At the D11 conference yesterday, Apple CEO Tim Cook explained why Apple hasn’t rushed to deliver multiple iPhone models to the market, noting that it takes “a lot of detailed work,” just to get one phone right.
Asked why Apple doesn’t expand the iPhone business as it did with the iPod last decade, Cook replied, “Well we haven't so far. That doesn't shut off the future.”
But while he didn’t rule out the possibility of seeing several new iPhones launching this year, Cook stressed that it’s not Apple’s goal to have a flurry of devices simply because there’s demand for everything in a phone.
“It takes a lot of work, a lot of really detailed work, to do a phone right, when you manage the hardware, software and services around it,” Cook relayed to Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher (video here).
“We’ve chosen to focus our energy on getting those right. And we’ve made the choices in order to do that. So we haven’t become defocused [by] working on multiple lines,” he said.
Commenting on larger screens, Cook said there are tradeoffs in this area and Apple isn’t willing to make them.
“A large screen today comes with a lot of tradeoffs. Customers are clearly looking at the size, but they also look at things like ‘do the photos show the proper color?’ The white balance, the reflectivity, battery life. The longevity of the display.”
The Apple CEO said the customer trusts them to make the decision for them, in what can be regarded as the remnants of Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field.
Apple has been rumored to introduce not one, but several new iPhone models this year, one of which is said to be a cheaper variant of the current-selling model with a plastic chassis.