7 Revealing Quotes From Apple CEO Tim Cook

"I do [miss him], every day. . . . When you work with someone for that long, for me anyway, the relationship is really important. I don't want to work with people I don't like. Life is too short. So you do become friends. Life has too few friends."

The two men (pictured here with head of marketing Phil Schiller) had known each other for over a decade. Tim took over as interim CEO three times during Steve Jobs's battle with pancreatic cancer. Steve, Apple's original visionary, passed away on Oct. 5, 2011.

"I certainly am not a fist-pounder. That isn't my style."

Tim's Southern accent epitomizes his conduct. Having grown up in Robertsdale, AL, the Apple CEO is often described as being a Southern gentleman and a fierce Auburn football fan.

"Everybody in our company is responsible to be innovative, whether they're doing operational work or product work or customer service work.

"[Creativity] is caring enough to call the person who works over in this other area, because you think the two of you can do something fantastic that hasn't been thought of before. It's providing an environment where that feeds off each other and grows."

The company's creative and collaborative working culture drives Apple forward. According to Tim, the enormous external pressure to innovate is nothing compared to the pressure exerted from the company's own employees.

"We have an executive team meeting. It's every Monday at 9 a.m. Religiously, all of us are in that meeting. We spend four hours together. We talk about everything in the company that's important — everything. We go through every product that's shipping, how it's doing. We go through every new product that's on the road map — what's going on, how the teams are doing, and any key issues there are. We might argue and debate current issues. We might argue and debate future road maps. We may get to a point where we say, 'You know, this one we've got to go off site and really brainstorm about it in a bigger way.'

"Every Wednesday we're meeting with product divisions. So a subset of the [executive team] will meet with the Mac division and spend several hours going through Mac. The following Wednesday we'll spend several hours going through iPhone, and then we'll go tick-tock, tick-tock again."

Apple is notorious for its supersecrecy, and Tim surprised us with this insider's look into his weekly meetings rundown. The executive team, which includes industrial design guru Jony Ive, worldwide marketing head Phil Schiller, and technologies VP Bob Mansfield, are extremely hands-on with production. Tim even visits Apple retail stores around the country to learn more about the company's customers.

"We wanted to provide the customer turn-by-turn directions. We wanted to provide the customer voice integration. We wanted to provide the customer flyover. And so we had a list of things that we thought would be a great customer experience, and we couldn't do it any other way than to do it ourselves.

"So it wasn't a matter of saying, 'Strategically it's important that we not work with company X.' . . . We screwed up. That's the fact."

Apple's iOS 6 operating system said goodbye to Google Maps in favor of its own in-house mobile maps app, Apple Maps. When the app started receiving less-than-stellar feedback, Tim published a humble letter apologizing for the app's shortcomings and, much to our surprise, suggested several alternatives.