During his China tour last month that took him to the eastern city of Hangzhou, home to the largest Apple Store worldwide, CEO Tim Cook said the Apple Watch has attracted greater adoption by developers than the earliest iPhones and iPads had, according to an interview published Monday by the Chinese language edition of Bloomberg Businessweek.
He said developers have been working on more than 3,500 apps for the watch, a data point Cook reiterated during the WWDC keynote earlier this month. By comparison, the App Store launched with 500 iPhone apps back in the summer of 2008 and there were about a thousand apps available for the first iPad in 2010.
Cook also made a point saying his company considers Chinese tastes in Apple product designs. As an example, he said Apple has decided to offer gold iPhones to cater to the 1.33 billion people market because gold is an extremely popular color among Chinese users.
Apple also considers details such as color palettes to suit local tastes, according to the June 17 interview. The CEO visited local schools and talked the importance of education, saying he was “gratified to see the students had an insatiable appetite for learning,” according to the news organization.
Apple is “helping orchestrate” more than 180 trial programs in China to help hearing-impaired children operate phones and teach kids how to compose music using Apple’s own GarageBand app, said Cook, adding Apple is hoping to transform traditional educational models and help Chinese students contribute to society.
The number of these programs is expected to increase by 50 percent before the end of 2015, Cook said. Greater China, which includes Taiwan and Hong Kong, is now Apple’s second-largest market accounting for 29 percent of its March quarter revenue.
Source: Bloomberg Businessweek