Tim Cook at D10: Loves That Customers, Rumor and News Sites Care About Apple

At this year's All Things D conference, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher interviewed Apple CEO Tim Cook about a range of topics. We offer a transcript of the interview, but didn't include the Q&A session because we were standing in line to ask Cook a question.

A number of questions were asked, including about Apple's product naming strategy and how Cook originally joined Apple -- I asked about his feelings regarding the attention paid to Apple and himself by rumor sites, the media and Apple's extremely passionate customers:

MacRumors: Jordan Golson from MacRumors.

You talk a lot about the emotion of the customers, there's a lot of passion amongst customers. Do you think the sort of attention that's paid to Apple from rumor sites and news sites and everybody is a distraction or a driver? How does that affect you and the company?

Tim Cook: I think it's a privilege to have people that care about the company and care enough to write, care enough to talk, and care enough to send me an email and say "you're out to lunch on this thing" and "you should be looking at this differently".

I think all of that is great, I love it. And do I want something printed on a website that's confidential? No, but I don't think that's what you're asking.

I view our ecosystem as including great sites that care deeply about the company and want to inform customers. I have no problem with people that disagree with things that we're doing. That's our country and I love it. It's great that we have disagreements.

Does that make sense?

Kara Swisher: He loves you.

(Image courtesy Dan Frommer/ReadWriteWeb)