Apple’s biggest contribution to mankind will be about health

Apple’s smartphone business may not be going as well as the company would like it to, but Apple has a plan on how to mitigate this.

According to CEO Tim Cook, who appeared on CNBC’s Mad Money on Monday, the company will announce new services this year. 

Cook refused to go into details. “There will be more things coming. I don’t wanna tell you what they are. (…) I’m not gonna forecast precisely, the ramps and so forth. But they’re things that we feel really great about, that we’ve been working on for multiple years,” he said near the end of the interview.

Cook seems to be most enthusiastic about Apple’s health-related efforts, which have gotten far more serious with last year’s launch of ECG and irregular heart rhythm notifications features for the Apple Watch. 

“If you zoom out into the future, and you look back, and you ask the question: ‘What was Apple’s greatest contribution to mankind?’, it will be about health,” he said. “We’re democratizing it. We’re taking what has been with the institutions and empowering the individual to manage their health.”

Cook also addressed criticisms that the iPhone XR was a flop, calling it “baloney.”

“Since we began shipping the iPhone XR, it has been the most popular iPhone every day,” he said. 

On the topic of AirPods and Watch, as well as the fact that Apple is not disclosing unit sales numbers in its financial reports anymore, Cook gives an interesting ballpark figure which I’m sure analysts will pore over in the future. 

“Let’s just take wearables as an example, mainly the Apple Watch and AirPods. On a trailing basis (…) the revenue from wearables is already 50 percent more than iPod on its peak. (…) Also, if you take AirPods and the Watch separately, and you sort of back these up and align it to the launch date of iPod as well (…) you will find that each one independently is like four to six time ahead of where iPod was in a comparable amount of time,” he said. 

Check out the entire interview in the video, above.