How to BUILD TOMORROW

Six years ago, the Apple CEO met Popular Mechanics veteran Ryan D'Agostino and connected over their appreciation for tinkering and for the magazine itself. Now, the two sit back down to talk about protecting your right to privacy, the life-changing power of wearable health tech, and how to be responsible and relentless at innovation.

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POPULAR MECHANICS: When we first met, you mentioned you had been a fan of Popular Mechanics growing up. What drew you to it? TIM COOK: It answered the question "How?" a lot. And it explored things that I was terribly interested in, from cars to space travel. It got me interested in the 50-in-1 Tandy Science Fair Radio Shack kit. And I think it's so awesome that it has survived over 100 years, that the magazine could evolve and still be for hobbyists and tinkerers the computer business got started in the same way. The people who were originally interested in computers were hobbyists and tinkerers.

PM: So much of innovation comes from messing around. Tinkering. Apple is known as a place where ideas can come from anyone, anywhere. How do you create that culture-and sustain it? TC: They don't take any singular route, they can come from everywhere in the company. We believe in putting groups of people together focused on solving some problem for a user. You pick diverse teams that look at the problem through different lenses.

We debate about things that we do and do not do, because we know we can only do a few things well. You have to debate and say no to a lot of great ideas so that you can spend your time on the ones that are truly unbelievable.

PM: Can you think of an example of some functionality of one of Apple's products that when you first heard about it, you said, "That's cool!" TC: Oh, they happen all the time. I feel like that every day-like a kid in a candy store. We were just talking in the hallway about M2 and M1the history there goes back well over a decade. It goes back to the genesis of the M chips, or the A chips, from iPhone and really getting in and figuring out, how do you put a powerful chip in something that small and not get it to heat up and burn up?