Apple’s Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and other Apple executives reflected on the company’s accomplishments this year and spoke about future plans during a virtual town hall meeting with employees, according to a report by Bloomberg.
During the meeting which took place on Thursday, Tim Cook touched on the subject of Apple’s employees physically returning to work, providing a rough timeline. He said its very likely that most of the employees won’t be returning to work at the offices until June 2021.
Cook said that virtual collaboration cannot completely replace in-person, face-to-face collaboration, but he also noted that the tech giant’s employees were still successful in doing the work remotely without making sacrifices.
Based on the CEO’s comments during the meeting, it appears that Apple might combine the best of both worlds in the future: the effective traditional working methods combined with the advantages of remote work.
“All of these learnings are important. When we’re on the other side of this pandemic, we will preserve everything that is great about Apple while incorporating the best of our transformations this year,” Cook told staff, according to Bloomberg’s sources.
Besides Tim Cook, there were several other Apple executives from different domains of work, who took their time to speak about the company’s experiences this year and plans for the future. The senior vice president of hardware engineering, Dan Riccio, for example, spoke about the difficulties of remotely designing products.
Apple’s engineers couldn’t be present on-site to help with designing and production due to Covid-19 restrictions. Riccio, said that the company found a way around this problem by letting the engineers remotely control robots from home through their iPads using augmented-reality (AR) tech, to guide the technicians present in the factories in China.
Apple’s head of custom chip development, Johny Srouji spoke about the cellular modem which went under development this year. The company has started building it’s own cellular modem which will be used in its devices in the future, and the in-house modem is meant to replace Qualcomm’s components which the company currently relies on.
The other Apple executives who spoke during the meeting include, operations executive Sabih Khan, Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, Lisa Jackson, John Giannandrea and others. The executives spoke about topics such as the struggles during COVID-19 pandemic, Apple’s climate pledge and AI.
CEO Tim Cook also briefly spoke about the company’s employee donation program, which has been very successful, especially this year. Since its inception, a total close to $600 million has been donated to charities and employees have volunteered more than one and a half million hours. Cook said that the company will be donating $5 million to organizations helping those who are affected by the pandemic.
Apple has had a phenomenal year, with the company reaching $2 trillion in market cap and Tim Cook finally becoming a billionaire.
