Since Apple unveiled the Apple Watch last fall, and despite all of the various applications the company has announced will come along with it, there’s still a prevailing question hanging over the media’s coverage of the company’s first wearable — why do we need this?
Apple CEO Tim Cook’s answer? You won’t know until you get it.
“[P]eople didn’t realize they had to have an iPod, and they really didn’t realize they had to have the iPhone,” Cook said during an interview with Fast Company first spotted by Business Insider. “And the iPad was totally panned. Critics asked, ‘Why do you need this?'”
“Honestly, I don’t think anything revolutionary that we have done was predicted to be a hit when released. It was only in retrospect that people could see its value. Maybe this will be received the same way.”
Cook’s philosophy lines up with a quote by Steve Jobs often used to illustrate the legendary innovator’s entrepreneurial spirit.
“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” Jobs famously told Business Week in 1991.
That philosophy has served Apple well. To date, the company has sold 700 million iPhones, with its most recent iPhone 6 beating Samsung in fourth quarter smartphone sales last year and pushing Apple’s value to $700 billion earlier this month — the first U.S. company to do so (in second place is Exxon Mobil, valued at $382 billion).
We’ll see if the first new product line since Steve Jobs’ passing in 2011 can keep that momentum when Apple Watch launches next month. (RELATED: Apple Watch Is Coming In April)