It’s true. I recently won the Charitybuzz auction for "coffee with Apple CEO Tim Cook at Apple Headquarters in Cupertino, California." Sure, it set me back 610,000 bones, but the nice folks at Charitybuzz have done me a solid by letting me hold off on payment until my one share of Apple stock hits that magic number. Which should be right after the iPad superMini 19 comes out.
At first, I considered waiting until Apple’s slow-to-rise Cheerio campus was complete before exercising the option on my coffee summit. But once I was assured that a couple dozen of Yum Yum’s finest would be in attendance, I borrow a jet from my goodish friend Warren and hightailed it from Omaha to Cupertino. After parachuting into the general San Jose vicinity (California no longer allows jets to land within the state lest they accidentally snuff out Diane Feinstein), I hopped onto a RideShare SBU and one-wheeled my way to One Infinite Loop. Which I only circled 13 times before the batteries went kaput.
After making my way through security with only a brief, 45-minute half-cavity search to slow me down, I was escorted the second inner room of Cook’s nested five-room inner sanctum. I was told this was the only one equipped with a burr grinder laser-cut from a solid chunk of Steve Ballmer’s gallbladder. Apparently, Tim Cook likes his coffee just one step below Starbucks Bitter. Tim, as I was instructed to call him, arrived exactly on time, if the giant, Flavor Flav clock around his neck was to be believed. And that, naturally, is where our conversation began. I have excerpted parts of it below for your mild amusement:
Fox: So, Tim. Am I to surmise that’s a first-gen iWatch?
Cook: The first aborted attempt, yes. Kodak threw it in to sweeten the QuickTake deal. Let me tell you, a sweetened turd is still a turd. Amiright?
Fox: I can only assume as much. But why are you wearing it?
Cook: Cuz it’s straight-up fly, yo. Also, it hides the glow of my arc reactor.
Fox: Ha! Good one.
Cook: Good what?
Fox: Umm, okay. Anyway, when I was bidding on this meeting, I noticed it had an "actual value" listed of $50,000. How on earth did you figure that?
Cook: It’s what I charge Ive to let him skip out on status meetings.
Fox: I see, I see. Do you ever get tired of the pundits predicting Apple’s demise, especially after Steve Jobs passed away?
Cook: Whenever I start feeling my chi going askew, I look at one of the vintage iMac G4s I use to display inspirational quotes and wait the three to six hours it takes for one by Steve himself to float by. It reads simply: Money talks, Ballmer balks.
Fox: I didn’t realize you harbored such antipathy for the man.
Cook: Who do you think shot the first pie-in-Ballmer’s-face video? Guy Kawasaki? Please.
Fox: I don’t recall ever seeing a video of Ballmer…
Cook: Of course not. Jobs had it expunged from the Internet.
Fox: You can do that?
Cook: Why do you think we put up with having Gore on our board? It ain’t for his love of CFLs and Häagen-Dazs.
Fox: What do think of Google Glass?
Cook: Creepy. That’s what. You want to pull off an interface like that, you gotta be sneaky. Like contact lenses. Which I am definitely not wearing now.
Fox: So that’s why your left eye is red.
Cook: Um, I was hanging with Snoop Lion last night.
Fox: Right. Anyway. When are you guys gonna do something really cool again, like that Leap Motion thing?
Cook: Seriously? You really want to wave your arms around like a Tasered monkey all day just to share some cat videos?
Fox: Says the man who includes four-fingered gestures in his OS.
Cook: Touché. You’re obviously not as dumb as your Gap jeans suggest. Fine. I’ll let you take a look at the final prototype of our Apple TV.
[At this point, Timbo pointed to a small black puck on the table that had been there the whole time. It looked like a current-generation Apple TV, only about 60% the size. A blue, circular port glowed on its top.]Fox: What? That thing again? I thought you were doing an actual panel. You know, something 4k with Siri integration.
Cook: First, 4k is for suckers. If we were to do a panel, it’d be Retina. You ready to pay for a 70-inch Retina display, Chachi? Didn’t think so. Second, Siri integration sounds like something Forstall would want, only he’d have to license the image of Majel Barret to get his skeuo on. Third, who doesn’t love a good hologram?
Fox: Are you telling me…
Cook: Yes. Impressive, no?
Fox: No. If I’d wanted to spend over half a million bucks to chat with a hologram, I’d have gone with the Sofia Vergara edition.
And with that, I was jettisoned from the facility—a little poorer, a little wiser, a little gassier. That’s right, even the hippified halls of Apple’s head honcho were barren of soy milk for this lactose-intolerant fool. But whatever. In the end, it really was no big whoop.
Later,
Fox