According to Warren Buffett, Tim Cook spent hours teaching him how to use his new iPhone 11

Warren Buffett

Back in February, Warren Buffett confirmed that, after years of using a flip phone, he’d finally decided to jump over onto the iPhone bandwagon.

In a recent interview with Yahoo Finance, Buffett gave some insight on how that transition went. Unsurprisingly it wasn’t the smoothest, because it’s not like Buffett was simply navigating away from a physical Home button to the newer interface designed for the all-screen iPhone design. Moving from a flip phone to an iPhone is a pretty big leap!

So it might not be a shock to hear that it took Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, more than a couple minutes to teach Buffett how to use his new iPhone 11.

Cook promised Buffett a couple of years ago that, if he did make the switch the CEO would teach the investor how to use the handset. Buffett says he traveled to California to get the one-on-one lesson from Cook, but it was not a quick lesson by any means:

I went out to California, and Tim Cook very patiently spent hours trying to move me up to the level of the average two-year-old,” Buffett told Yahoo Finance’s editor-in-chief Andy Serwer in an exclusive interview on March 10 in Omaha, Nebraska. “And didn’t quite make it.

We had a lot of fun. He is a terrific guy,” Buffett said. “Unbelievable product.

Buffett has confirmed that the iPad is a tool for the investor to keep tabs on the stock market, and he uses for general research. Meanwhile, the iPhone is all about the phone for Buffett, only using the super powerful device to make phone calls. But even that proved pretty difficult:

Yesterday, I was someplace,” he said. “Somehow I was having a little trouble just getting into — but this is only me, any two-year-old could do this — but I was having a little trouble getting to the part where I actually phone somebody.

Buffett’s troubles with the iPhone 11 are still ongoing. So much so, in fact, that Buffett didn’t bring the device with him to the interview with YF. Why? Because the investor was afraid that the handset would ring during the interview and he “wouldn’t know what to do with it”.

Poor guy. Hopefully one day he’ll be able to figure out how to use the iPhone well enough that he can play his own Paperboy-inspired mobile game. Or maybe not.