APPLEVERSE—Apple CEO Tim Cook made a comment during an interview on MSNBC Wednesday that seemed to signal a fundamental shift for Apple away from late co-founder Steve Jobs' Draconian stance against adult content being viewed on the iPhone.
Speaking about the intense scrutiny Apple gives every app before approving it to be offered in the iPhone App Store, Cook said that while the company maintains a strict bar for what sort of apps it will allow, "It doesn't mean that you can't use an iPhone to go to your browser and go to some porno site if you want to do that."
While interviewer Kara Swisher responded with a deadpan, "Nobody does that," eliciting a big laugh from the audience, Cook's very suggestion that users were free to access adult content in that way with an iPhone registered as a departure from what Business Insider called "Jobs' well-known dislike of adult-entertainment content." As BI further noted, Jobs famously made numerous comments reflecting this hardline position, including that the iPhone offered users "freedom from porn" and "folks who want porn can buy an Android phone."
Despite Cook's seemingly more accepting attitude, however, he made no indication that apps offering adult content would be allowed in the App Store at any point in the foreseeable future. Following his above comment, he qualified, "I'm not making fun of it, but I'm just saying that it's not what we want to put in our store."
Earlier in the interview, Cook also professed, "We don't subscribe to the view that you have to let everybody in that wants to or if you don't, you don't believe in free speech. We don't believe that. Because we're like the guy on the corner store—what you sell in that store says something about you, and if you don't want to sell that other thing, you don't sell it."
See the entire interview here.
Screen shot taken from MSNBC.com.
