Tim Cook Doesn't Care if PCs Are Dying, Says Apple Has Big Plans for Health Tech

Apple has shipped its new iPhones, it has just begun selling its new Apple TV model and the physically massive supposed PC-killing iPad Pro goes on sale tomorrow. Great. What’s next for the world’s most valuable tech company?

In an interview with the Telegraph’s Allister Heath, Apple CEO Tim Cook teased that the company is working on an as yet unrevealed health technology project, and said he’s fine with eventual declines in Apple’s desktop computing business, positioning the iPad Pro as its successor.

“Yes, the iPad Pro is a replacement for a notebook or a desktop for many, many people. They will start using it and conclude they no longer need to use anything else, other than their phones,” Cook said. He added that it doesn’t bother him if consumers move to iPads and smartphones instead of Macs or MacBooks, because “as long as we cannibalize [ourselves], it’s fine.”

But the real meat of the interview is in what Cook suggested about the future of the Apple Watch. He declined to any share Apple Watch sales numbers (other than to say this quarter would be record-setting), but he played up the watch’s medical technology angle quite a bit, referencing an American high school senior whose life was saved by the device’s heart rate monitor.

Here’s the relevant portion, in which Cook says more Apple health tech is on the way but that he doesn’t want to submit the watch for FDA approval:

Cook hints that Apple may have more plans for the health sphere, in a revelation which will intrigue Wall Street, but he doesn’t want the watch itself to become a regulated, government-licensed health product. “We don’t want to put the watch through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) process. I wouldn’t mind putting something adjacent to the watch through it, but not the watch, because it would hold us back from innovating too much, the cycles are too long. But you can begin to envision other things that might be adjacent to it — maybe an app, maybe something else.”

You can read the full interview on the Telegraph’s website.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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