Weekend surprise. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, who was at his company’s store on Fifth Avenue in New York on Friday for the launch of the new iPhone 15, appeared on Saturday at the block’s establishment in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol. . The number of people who gathered to greet him and take photos was overwhelming. On this two-day tour of the city, Cook has mainly interviewed creators, such as musicians, chefs, photographers and artists. Yesterday La Vanguardia had the opportunity to follow him in his meeting with the Catalan illustrator Ignasi Monreal.
In two days, Cook has eaten with chef Dabiz Muñoz at Lhardy (a Madrid classic), he has attended a mini-concert by Guitarricadelafuente – of which he now declares himself a “fan for life” –, he has visited the Real Madrid sports city with Florentino Pérez, the International Center of Photography and Film (EFTI), an ecological restaurant and the design and architecture space Madrid in Love (MIL), where he met with Monreal to learn about his work, in which he uses the iPad to create innovative illustrations for brands such as Gucci, Bulgari, Mercedes-Maybach, or the singers Rosalía and Dua Lipa.
Why visit Madrid to meet with creators? Cook told this newspaper that “Apple’s history is making devices for creative people and to educate students and one thing deep in our DNA is creativity.” “We have always admired – he observed – creative people, whether in music, literature, painting, graphic design, photography and video films.”
Cook assured that Apple listens to what artists ask of it to incorporate it into its brand’s products: “every time we make a device, we put it out there and see what people do with it. We learn something and incorporate it into our design process to make things even better.” He asked Monreal what he could do to make the iPad more useful to him. A less heavy Magic Keyboard, the artist asked. “Good feedback,” said the manager as a gesture of having taken note for the future.
“Ultimately, we want to democratize things and make it so that anyone can make a full-length movie with the iPhone, which is really geared toward that, or anyone can make a quality photograph.” The process of exchanging ideas between those who create and those who put the tools at their disposal is, according to the senior executive, “symbiotic.”
Cook noted that technology can take the creative world further by opening new horizons. “Before you couldn’t change the color of something while you were working on it. You were stuck on your initial vision of what it was. And I think that’s just a simple example,” he commented. He indicated that now “you can delete things, you can iterate, you can go back and look at the different layers of what you’ve been working on,” which he believed “empowers people to do more, go further and go faster.” . Technology alone, he admitted, is not enough: “I’m not saying that anyone can do that, but a lot of people have been empowered, as we have seen on this trip.”
A specialist in creating new user interfaces, last June Apple presented the Vision Pro viewer, which mixes virtual reality and augmented reality in the user’s environment and only needs the eyes and fingers as elements to operate it.
Asked if the new device could be a paradigm shift, not only in the way we use computers, but also for art, he considered that “Vision Pro is the first spatial computing product and in the computing part, if you think about all of them.” “The things you can do with a Mac today, all of them can be done with Vision Pro too.” He added that in some cases, better than the computer. For example, in the size of the canvas or in immersion. “Much better than working on a fixed screen. So I have no doubt that it will take art even further,” he said.
