Apple's Vice President in Poland. Greg Joswiak talks to Spider's Web about the cheapest iPhone

Five years ago, Greg "Joz" Joswiak took over the role of senior vice president of global marketing at Apple, taking duties previously held by Phil Schiller. Today, he oversees each of the main product lines and reports directly to Tim Cook. He began working at the Cupertino-based company in 1986, right after graduating from the University of Michigan. This was shortly after Steve Jobs left Apple to focus on developing NEXT computers in the 1980s.

Greg Joswiak initially worked on Macs and, upon Jobs' return, played a key role in the launches of products like the iPod and iPhone. He has been involved in marketing for over 30 years. Now he’s responsible not only for phones but also for iPads, Macs, and services, like Apple TV+. After the launch of the iPhone 16e, "Joz" came to Poland, and we had the opportunity to talk about his Polish roots, Apple's newest product and the services we are eagerly awaiting.

Piotr Grabiec, Spider's Web: I know that you're somehow connected to Poland, you even mentioned it in your tweet last night. Could you elaborate and tell something more about it?

Greg Joswiak, Apple: I’m very excited to be here. I'm hundred percent Polish descent. Both sides of my family are from Poland from a long time ago, but not that many generations ago. My great grandfather came over with my grandfather, who was a baby. They came from the Poznan region. My other grandfather, my mother's father, came over from the Suwałki area. They came at a time when Poland was partitioned, there wasn't really even a country named Poland then. It was before World War I.

They were always very proud Polish Americans, but the language stopped at my parents. They could speak fluent Polish, I could not. I knew a few words when I was young, but they used to like to talk in Polish in front of us kids so they could speak in code. They could have their own conversation without us knowing what they were saying. We were always raised to be proud Polish Americans.

I've been very excited to come here. Obviously, the timing is great. Our business is booming here, it is quite strong. Of course, we timed it to be here with the launch of the iPhone 16e, which has also gotten off to a very nice start.

And I hope that your stay will be pleasant! Buy to go with iPhone 16e, I just gotta ask: what’s the meaning behind „e”? I have my own guesses, but would like to hear what it means for you.

That's part of the fun of these things. We don't ever like to be explicit, even though we can think of a lot of "e" words. In reality, there's no single "e" word. You've seen the games that people have played online, guessing what the "e" words are. In a lot of ways, they're all right. We didn't mean it to be just any single word.

And who came up with the name, how is it done at Apple: was it you personally, your team, Tim Cook himself, or someone else?

That's part of what our group does. We work with our engineering team and obviously Tim to figure out what products we're going to create, what features they're going to be. Our job is to bring the customer perspective, the market perspective, into that conversation. Then we work with engineering on the creation of those products. Then we come out and tell the story of those products.

Some companies keep those product management and product marketing separate. For us, it's the same. We want to have the people who are involved in helping create these products come out and talk about them. One of our other functions is, of course, we name features and products. This [iPhone 16e’s name] was the same thing that my group created. Obviously, we make sure Tim is okay with it, we give him our rationale, but yes, that was part of what our group did.

As for me, at first I thought that it's „e”, so for everyone, but then I realized that there are obviously other iPhone 16 model, so I would go with everyman. And to follow this up, who do you think are the typical customers that this device was made for, how would you describe them?

To give you a little bit of our thinking - some people expected, based on bad rumors and guesses, that we were doing an [iPhone] SE4. But SE was a bit of a legacy product for us. It was designed on the older home button design, a lot of older technologies that were in it. We wanted to create something much more modern.

What we wanted to do was extend the range of the iPhone 16 family, so that we'd have multiple pricing tiers there, to make the most current generation of our technology available to more people. That was really the thinking, that allowed us to have a 16e, a 16, and a 16 Pro, with hopefully a rational set of feature decisions that go through that line and pricing that goes with it and our ability to bring it to even more people.

And the iPhone 16e is less expensive than the 16 model, so there needed to be some things that are missing. One of it is the second camera…

But we have a main camera, also 48 megapixels! And it is a 2-in-1 camera, which is important. It's able to take an optical quality telephoto picture. The number one use of the camera is just normal wide camera, that main camera functions. The second use is telephoto. This offers you the ability to do telephoto, still optical quality, it doesn't need any additional scaling. We think it takes very nice pictures.

So now we have few iPhones: 16, 16e, then older 15 and 14. 16 is obviously taking better pictures than 16e, but how does the 16e with Apple A18 compare to 15s and 14s with older chips? How would you rank them, since photos quality nowadays depends on optics and on post-processing combined?

If you look at the consumer line, our number one thinking was to make sure that there was a rational build-up going from the 16e to the 16 to the 16 Pro. And obviously the camera ranks in that order as you go. But we are always able to bring a lot of new thinking to our camera systems, also in the way of computational photography.

I tell people: math can sometimes beat physics. Because the way that better cameras have done good pictures in the past is just by being bigger. It's the fact that they have large lenses, large distance between the lens and the sensor, and that enables them to have physics that enable a good picture.

What an iPhone can do is bring more math into it. We can figure out how to use computational photography to make a great picture even out of a smaller lens and a smaller sensor. And that's our strength. So I'll let the testers figure out, but I would say that the 16e is better than the 14 or 15.

The other main difference between 16 and 16e is that with new Apple A18 in 16e you have one GPU core less. What was the reasoning behind that? It is simply less expensive for you to make it with four GPU cores, or maybe it's the binning process somehow involved here?

I think it's part of a rational sell-off. Certainly, this is tradition in binning, to have this sort of thing. I don't think that's out of the ordinary. I think you'll find that it performs amazingly well.

And how the one less GPU core impacts the gaming experience? What takes the hit if you compare 16e to 16 is it the frames per second or the texture quality or something else?

It really depends on the game. Obviously, if it's something that is hitting the GPU hard, you want as many GPU cores as you can get. But I think for most things you're going to find that it's going to perform quite well. That's the beauty of our silicon, because an A18 is already ahead of the competition. So I think you'll be quite satisfied.

And then there’s MagSafe, we don't have it in iPhone 16e. There are third-party companies though, which are making cases with magnets in them, to use with MagSafe chargers. But you don’t. Why?

We do a handful of cases, which is nice, and we have a nice case business, but we're also cognizant of the fact that it is a great opportunity for case manufacturers to create that sort of thing. And we love the fact that there are all kinds of cases that people create for their iPhones, that people can buy for their iPhones, that have all different kinds of designs and capabilities.

What we found is that MagSafe is an incredible feature, of course, and it's used significantly by our pro customers. Not as much as you go down the line, but it's kind of nice that we do support wireless charging, so that will work. And of course, to your point, if you want to have the magnets, it's very easy to get a case that has them.

And about the cases, I have some older cases in my drawer, but I can't use them with iPhone 16e. The problem is the placing of the LED, it’s slightly moved when compared to the for example 16. Don't you think it would be good, from the ecological point of view, for the older cases to match new phones, so you could use them longer?

Every time that we create a new iPhone design, it is a bit of a jigsaw puzzle as to how we fit everything in, in a way that makes the most efficient use of the space within the device. That's our number one goal. And as you know, one of the things that we're very proud of in the 16e is it's got phenomenal battery life. And we've been able to achieve that phenomenal battery life in a couple of different ways.

One is you've seen us talk about C1, our Apple wireless modem, which is the most power efficient cellular modem we've ever had in an iPhone. So it's incredibly efficient. That gives us longer battery life. But also we engineered the insides to have a larger battery, too. So that is about how you optimize that placement. You know, the case fits or not… that would be nice [if it would], but that's not what's driving it. It's driving having the best iPhone design that's driving our engineering decisions.

Okay, we talked about three things that 16e doesn’t have compared to 16, but there is one thing that it has that the more expensive 15 doesn't: Apple Intelligence. And since AI is one of the main reasons to buy 16e, I must tackle the elephant in the room: when we will have Polish version of Apple Intelligence?

We're going to continue expanding our languages for the products that support Apple Intelligence. For us, this is not a sprint as much as it is a marathon. We look at generative AI as one of the most impactful things that's happened to our industry, really, since the iPhone. It's a big deal. And we're building not to try to just satisfy something for the first year, but really to try to build a foundation that we can build on and do it right and add that kind of capability.

We're not just trying to create another chatbot. We're trying to integrate it [AI] deeply into the system in a way that works to make the features better, and still protects your privacy. So obviously we're trying to bring it to as many people as we can, and we'll continue to bring out new languages. And as you know, Poland is obviously a very important country to us.

And there are also other services that we are missing, that are not translated to Polish, like Fitness Plus or Apple News…

Yeah, those are the two biggies.

…and yet we can't access them. But, you know, we know English, we learn English in elementary school. Why won't you let us use these two features in at least original language version in Poland?

Yeah, that's great feedback. I'll bring that back to that team. But as you know, we've done a very good job of bringing our other services here. Most recently, Apple Pay and [new version of] Apple Maps in 2023. So we're continuing to make sure that we look for any holes that we have and try to figure out how we can bring them to you in the best possible way.

And going back to 16e and marketing, you are responsible for the global market, so Poland included. What are the regional factors that you have to take into account when making marketing materials and strategy for our country, specifically?

This one of the things that we do is, as you said, I have worldwide responsibility, which means that I don't have just a team in Cupertino that does the product marketing and the markup. We have teams internationally, so teams that support Central Europe, support Poland.

I always bring to us feedback, of course, from people like yourself, as well as customers. There are some things that the market needs that we need to do, kind of things that we do with our tuning, our marketing message. Now, that said, I always try to be very authentic to who we are.

We don't want to appear like we act like a different company in a different country, because some brands do: they are a completely different brand in one country than they are in the other. We always try to be who we are and then try to express that in the best possible way locally. And like I said, we have teams here to help us do that.

And would you say that 16e was an iPhone built specifically with markets like Poland in mind?

I think it's going to be very successful here and it's gotten off to a good start. But really looking at it, it is a way to make a new generation of iPhone 16 affordable to even more people, how to bring it to more people. Certainly that includes Poland, but certainly that will extend to other markets as well.

What do you think is the general reception of 16e in Poland?

It's been great! One of the things that I'm excited about, first of all, is that I told you earlier how much our business is booming here. Our market share in iPhone is just about doubled in the last two years. It's growing significantly. And one of the strengths that we have is the Gen Z.

And literally everywhere I go around the world, as I have my worldwide responsibilities, this is a common theme that we are doing even better with Gen Z. And we're coming from a place of success with the other generations, but Gen Z has our highest market share, our highest awareness, our highest brand affinity. That's important to us because obviously these people are going to be around for a long time. We share a lot with Gen Z: we're very value-based, we want to leave the world better than we found it. That's important to that generation.

Our products are also great for creativity, we help expose creativity and enable creativity. This generation has been expressing their creativity in ways that are way beyond what previous generations have done. And they believe in being authentic, as I referenced earlier. They smell bullshit from a mile away, and we just try to always be who we are. How we approach things is just being authentic to who we are. The environment is important to them, the environment is important to us. There's a lot of things that make that the case.

And we saw yesterday how much the iPhone 16e was attractive to Gen Z. We actually did some stuff with creative influencers, there's the musician Faustyna [Maciejczuk], I'm sure you know her, and her videographer Konrad [Tułak]. They are using the iPhone 16e to do a teaser for her upcoming music video. We get excited by that kind of stuff. We love to see people using our products to express their creativity. And I think the iPhone 16e is going to enable more people to do that.

You said that you doubled the market share in Poland and I wonder if you connect it to the local price drop. In the US the main iPhone is sold at 999$ since like forever, but in Poland prices where jumping up and down, once it’s 5k zloty, then it’s 4k. Where are those fluctuations come from?

We're always trying to make sure we have the right value. Obviously, as a dollar-based company, currency exchange rates do affect how we have to price our products. But that said, we're always trying to make sure that we have a great value. And I think the 16e is a great value in there. It’s, as you know, 2999 zlotys.

But even more important, we work with our carrier partners who are also very excited about iPhone and their business. It brings the right customers to them. It's something that is good for them, it's good for us. And they're always looking for ways they can make even better deals for their customers as well. And they're very excited for 16e to help them do that.

And about the carriers, maybe you can tell me why there is still no RCS support in Poland on iPhone’s. Everyone was screaming at Apple for years „allow the RCS support!”, you did it, and yet - nobody picks it up now.

It does need cooperation between us and the carriers. We didn't expect it was going to be overnight that everybody would support RCS. We made it as, "Look, here's a way to have a common platform that SMS has served that need”. I would like to say a more modern replacement for SMS, but the reality is it's still not modern. RCS is fairly old.

We're working with the RCS teams, the standards teams, to bring more to RCS, to bring encryption to RCS, to bring the right way to express different things around the messages in a standards-based way and not just do things like one company might dictate. So, it's the kind of thing that will happen.

So based on your cooperation with carriers, you think it's the process that will eventually be completed? It's not the dead end that carriers backed up from?

It's not the dead end at all, but it's the kind of thing that I don't think anybody felt an urgency to have to move to because SMS is there as a safety net. But I think you will see more and more people moving to it over time.

As the carriers go, the one thing that I would like to see the most, is for the Polish carriers to support Apple Watch LTE abroad, in roaming. It would be great, because when on vacation in Poland, I can go to the beach with only my Apple Watch. In for example Italy, not so much.

Yes, yes, yes. More feedback-noted, yes.

Going back to the 16e prices, why there is no 64 GB model, which would be even more affordable? What's your reasoning here?

We think 128 GB was a good place to start. We see more and more of our customers wanting that as a starting base of storage. And obviously we want this [iPhone 16e] to be, as I said, a modern iPhone. So, we're starting everything now with it, no less than 128.

Is it connected to the, for example, language models that you need to download, that are a few gigabytes in size?

It's everything. People are always taking more pictures, that takes space. Obviously loading in more languages models, as you said, all kinds of reasons that storage space could use over time. That does add up and we're happy that we've moved this up to 128. It's a great place to start.

And we have this one base model, but in reality there are more than one iPhone 16e. In different regions there are different features. In Europe we have some services that European Union demanded, in the US there is no SIM card slot, but there is mmWave support. Where are the differences coming from?

To your point on eSIM, we're very excited about this technology because it's such an easy way to transfer to a new phone, to have it just done automatically. It takes up less space inside the phone. Obviously a SIM socket is a fairly large thing inside a device and we’re trying to, again, as we talked about earlier, maximize everything you can put in there and have the largest possible battery, for example. So eSIM is a customer convenience overall and offers us more space, which ultimately will give you more features and/or battery life as a user.

We've taken our U.S. phones over to only eSIM, no physical SIM, and that's been working great. The carriers love it too because their success rate of moving somebody on eSIM is higher than physical SIM, and as you know, sometimes SIMs get out of date, and then the customer has to either go to a store to get a new physical SIM, a new generation of a SIM, or they have to get it mailed to them, which takes time and money, of course, and with an eSIM, none of that happens. It's just hassle-free.

As for the mmWave, you need a carrier support. And there's just not a lot of carriers that support it.

As the battery battery life goes, we talked about it a lot already, but I want to clarify one thing: is the Apple C1 modem the main reason that 16e has the best battery life compared to all iPhone’s of this size?

One thing is C1, which is huge, because it's significantly more power efficient than what we had before. And as we talked about, we engineered iPhone 16e to have an even larger battery. And of course, we're always improving our power management that we have in iOS. So really, it's the three of those things that combine together to say that we were able to provide really breakthrough battery life.

People will be now deciding between iPhone 16e and other iPhones. So from all the features, that you gain deciding to go with 16 instead of 16e, what do you think is the main reason to pick the more expensive phone?

That's a personal decision, right? That's the kind of thing that we want to have those sorts of choices available to our customers, so they can decide what's important to them. And if the feature is important, then they should buy the product that supports the feature that's important to them. But that's a personal choice. Better for people to decide on their own!

As for me, one of the features I use most, in Apple products in general is the hearing-aid in AirPods Pro. I wonder, do you have any estimates on how many people are using it on daily basis?

Not that I can provide to you publicly, but obviously there's the ability to monitor some of those things. We have diagnostic capabilities that customers can opt into, as you know, because we try to be very privacy-protecting. So I don't have anything to announce to you, but I can tell you it's been a very popular feature.

We also have had so many customers who have come to us to tell us how it's changed their life. We talked about when we introduced the feature that there are over a billion people in the world of hearing loss. But the amazing thing is even after people get a hearing test that shows they have hearing loss, 80% of them don't go and take the next step of getting a hearing aid. It's understandable in a lot of ways. There's a lot of friction. They're expensive. You have to go to an audiologist.

Some people just don't even like the stigma of wearing a hearing aid. We have diffused all that. So it's obviously the hearing test is something you know you take right on your iPhone. It takes five minutes. It gives you a clinical grade test. It takes that same setting. It uses it to create a customized profile for your hearing aid feature of the AirPods Pro. I've had younger people tell me that they've had hearing loss and they wouldn't wear a hearing aid, but they're comfortable wearing AirPods. So we're very proud of this feature. It's part of our ongoing commitment to health and this one has been very good.

And since our time is running out, I would like to circle back to your trip to Poland: How long will you stay here…

Not long enough!

…and what did you see already, what made the biggest impression?

First of all, I'm incredibly excited to be here. In addition to other business preparation for the trip, I spent a little bit of chasing my roots and understanding when my families came across, why they came across. I was able to find quite a bit online as far as genealogy sort of stuff and find records and stuff of my ancestors that made the trip over.

It helped me really gain an appreciation for what they had done, how difficult it was to emigrate. First of all, the difficult circumstances they had here at the time that would cause them to have to leave their homeland and leave their families that were here in order to pursue a better life for themselves and their families. And then what a difficult trip that was to the United States during those times, to re-establish themselves in a new country. Without them doing that, I don't exist. I wish my parents were alive to see that I'm on this trip. They would have been quite proud of that.

Do you have still any relatives here?

I'm sure I do, but I don't know where they're at (laugh)! I'm Joswiak, Jóźwiak. My last name, I've americanized to Joswiak, but Jóźwiak is a name more popular in Poznań. I'm glad to come back here with my family and chase a little bit of my roots. I would like to go to Poznań, where my father's family, as I mentioned, and my mother's family, in Suwałki, up in the northeast corner. Maybe I'll see if I can find some.

What are you planning to see next in Poland during your stay?

Only Warsaw this time, we're just here for a couple of days. We're going to go tomorrow, unfortunately, moving on. But like I said, I plan to come back here and spend more of my own personal time here. Like I said, not only is our business doing well, it's my people.\

Photos: Michał Radwański