Tim Cook speaking at a Goldman Sachs conference

Very interesting 45 minutes, if you want to learn more about the most valuable company in the USA.

You can listen to the speech at the Apple site

You can read a postscript on a Fortune tech blog

I’ll give you my top 3 quotes:

The iPad crossing the 55 million sold mark within 2 years:

It took us 22 years to sell 55 million Macs. It took us about 5 years to sell 22 million iPods, and it took us about 3 years to sell that many iPhones

On educating employees

We provide free classes in many of the locations in our supply chain, and we partner with local colleges to provide courses like English, and entrepreneurship, and computer skills, and the like.

More than 60,000 employees have attended these classes, which is pretty amazing when you think about it. If you could take all of these employees and move them to one location, it would be a campus population larger than Arizona State, which is the largest public university in the United States.

Many of these workers go on to earn associate’s degrees. So this is a very powerful stepping stone for people looking to advance their careers and their lives.

On competing on price:

Price is rarely the most important thing. A cheap product might sell some units and somebody may get it home and you know, they feel great when they pay from their wallets, but then they get it home and use it, and the joy is gone. And the joy is gone every day that they use it and that’s why they’re not using it anymore! You don’t keep remembering “Oh, I got a good deal,” because you hate it!

These 3 points do reflect for me enormously the culture of Apple. They are the most popular brand in the world with for many people expensive products.

Great to hear as well that Tim Cook takes his own line in representing the company and keeping up the good work.

If you have a moment to spare, for you sure you should read the article or listen to it.