by Jason Snell
’20 minutes with Tim Cook’
Tim Cook is in New York for tonight’s “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and made a surprise visit to the Fifth Avenue Apple Store. Buzzfeed’s John Paczkowski got to ride along and ask him a few questions along the way. Most notably, about that folder you’ve got on your iPhone that’s full of Apple apps you can’t uninstall.
Why are there apps on the iOS that I can’t delete even though I never use them? Why does Apple insist that I keep Tips and Stocks on my iPhone when I’d like nothing more than to delete them?
For Cook the question seems a familiar one. “This is a more complex issue than it first appears,” he says. “There are some apps that are linked to something else on the iPhone. If they were to be removed they might cause issues elsewhere on the phone. There are other apps that aren’t like that. So over time, I think with the ones that aren’t like that, we’ll figure out a way [for you to remove them]. … It’s not that we want to suck up your real estate; we’re not motivated to do that. We want you to be happy. So I recognize that some people want to do this, and it’s something we’re looking at.
There’s serious complexity here—some of these apps are tied into key parts of iOS and they can’t really be deleted. But I know I’d love to send the Stocks app to someplace where the sun doesn’t shine.