Apple CEO Tim Cook recently visited Japan for the opening of their state-of-the-art research and development facility. He described it as a “center for deep engineering that will be very different from the R&D base Apple plans to build in China.”
“I cannot tell you the specifics,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told Nikkei Asian Review while riding on a bullet train in Japan. “The specific work is very different.”
According to the report Cook is seeking to integrate artificial intelligence into all of their product offerings including presumably the iPhone. “AI is horizontal in nature, running across all products and is used in ways that most people don’t even think about.”
“We want the AI to increase your battery life and recommend music to Apple Music subscribers,” he said. “AI could (even) help you remember where you parked your car.”
“Smartphones are 9 years old,” he said. “We are not even teenagers yet. We just got going. I think there is an incredible future ahead.”
Apple Seeks to Promote Cashless Society
Apple’s CEO sees Apple Pay as the beginning of the end of cash worldwide. “We would like to be a catalyst for taking cash out of the system,” said Cook. “We don’t think the consumer particularly likes cash.”
Likely, Cook is talking about what everyone predicts, we are on a course toward a cashless society over the next 20-40 years and Apple would like to be a leader in making that happen.
Cook said Apple intends to increase their push into mobile payments in Japan and all of Asian, with Apple Pay finally coming to Japan later this month. The iPhone 7 will become their first mobile phone to work with Japan’s FeliCa contactless payment system. “Japan is important to us,” said Cook. “FeliCa was born in Japan and so by extension, FeliCa is important.”
Of course, it’s not the first time that Tim Cook has predicted the end of cash. “Your kids will not know what money is,” Cook told students at Trinity College in Dublin last year.