Eddy Cue
The consumer technology industry of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw a handful of companies reshape how people access media, pay for goods, and store their digital lives. Eddy Cue is one of the executives working inside one of that era's central players.
Born on October 23, 1964, in Miami, Cue is an American businessperson and computer scientist who studied at Duke University. He currently serves as Apple's senior vice president of Services, reporting directly to CEO Tim Cook. That role places him across a wide portfolio of consumer-facing products and platforms, making his day-to-day responsibilities unusually broad even by the standards of a large technology company.
The range of what Cue oversees reflects how much Apple's services layer has expanded. He's responsible for the iTunes Store, Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Books Store, Apple Pay, Siri, Maps, iCloud services, iAd, and Apple's productivity and creativity apps. In practical terms, that means the streaming music a user plays on their commute, the digital book they download at the weekend, the map they pull up when they're lost, and the payment they tap through at a checkout are all areas that fall under his watch. Few executives at any company carry responsibility across that many distinct product categories simultaneously.
Cue's name also appeared in a more adversarial setting when he testified in the antitrust case brought against Apple over allegations of conspiring to fix eBook pricing. The case put Apple's digital content business under close legal scrutiny, and Cue's appearance as a witness connected his oversight of the company's digital content platforms directly to the proceedings. That testimony stands as one of the most publicly documented moments in his career.
Quotes by Eddy Cue
My mom is from Cuba, my dad is from Spain, and I grew up in Miami. So there's maybe a little more flair in me than typical Silicon Valley types.
I've always felt that technology companies have disrespected the content creation process, and the content creation people disrespect technology.
In recent years, the government has lost more than five million fingerprints from government employees. They have lost hundreds of millions of credit numbers from financial institutions. This problem is happening more and more and more. And the only way we can protect ourselves is to make phones more and more secure.
The fact that I have to set things to record seems idiotic. And channel guides - I get home, and I want to watch a Duke basketball game; why do I have to go hunting to find out what channel it's on? Why can't I just say, 'I want to watch Duke basketball.' Or, even better, why doesn't the system know that?
The quality of TV, I think, is at an all-time high. The problem with it is the way that we end up consuming it - generally a cable box. A satellite receiver is, to me, nothing more than a glorified VCR.
When you look at Apple News and where it started, I want it to be available to everyone. But we also want to make sure the news producers are legitimate... We're very concerned about what's news items and what's clickbait.
One thing you know, if you've been in technology a while, you're only as good as the last thing you did. No one wants an original iPod. No one wants an iPhone 3GS.
That's the great thing about Apple: it's very focused on the things that we know how to do very well and not try to extend ourselves to areas that we know very little about or don't have a lot of expertise in.
People will pay for great services. They said they wouldn’t pay 99 cents for a song but they did. We’ve always believed that. When you go to work, you don’t work for free; nobody works for free. Nobody can say, “I want to work for free.” Nobody says that.
