Eddie Cue Vehemently Disagrees Apple’s Innovation Has Slowed

Some critics believe that Apple is no longer innovative, or that its pace of innovation has slowed. Eddy Cue is not one of those people.

The Apple services chief said that he disagrees “vehemently” with that opinion in a recent interview with Indian publication Livemint. Cue added that he believes Apple has been “incredibly innovative.” Specifically, Cue was responding to a question about the perception that Apple’s pace of innovation has slowed since the release of the first iPhone and the death of co-founder Steve Jobs.

“No way!” Cue responded, later adding “When you think of the products that we’ve built over time, you own a lot of them. And you just assume that every year was a new product. But it wasn’t. You can’t do revolutionary new products, every two months or six months or whatever. They take time.”

While the tidbit was an interesting piece of the interview, most of the conversation focused on Apple’s plans for India — a burgeoning new market for the tech industry, and a “very long-term opportunity” for Apple, according to Cue.

The services chief said that Apple is primarily focused on the App Store, Apple Maps and other services such as iCloud and Apple Music in India. He also said that Cupertino tech giant is working to bring Apple Pay to the country of over 1 billion.

“Apple Pay is something that we definitely want in India,” Cue said. “The challenge with payment mechanisms is that there isn’t really a lot of global scale. You deal with individual markets at a time … but India is one of those markets where we hope to bring Apple Pay to.” Despite that, Cue added that Apple Pay in India is not a “100 percent” certainty at this time and there’s no exact word on when the payments platform will be released.

India will likely turn out to be a key battleground for Apple: it’s a rapidly growing market — one that will overtake the U.S. as the largest in the world behind China — and one that Apple is far from dominant in. But Cupertino is making various moves beyond services to edge its way into the country’s mobile market.

Early this year, Apple announced that it would begin manufacturing iPhones at its Bengaluru, India plant sometime this year. It is also allowing Indian retailers to slash prices on older iPhones in order to gain traction. The company has also expressed interest in bringing its Apple retail outlets to the country, despite certain restrictions currently preventing it from doing so.

The rest of the interview focused on various topics, including the differing leadership styles of Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, and Apple’s push to create its own original content. On that last note, Cue added that Apple isn’t necessarily planning on “disrupting” the content industry — just bringing an innovative slant to content on their ecosystem and platform.