Rivlin meets Apple CEO as company expands in Israel

Apple CEO Tim Cook meets President Rivlin, who praises Cook’s “unprecedented contribution to humanity.”

“It is a great privilege to host you and your team here in Israel,” Rivlin says. “Even for me, as one who prefers to write with a pen and paper, it is clear what a great miracle you have created when I look at my staff, and my grandchildren.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook (L) with President Reuven Rivlin (Photo credit: Amos Ben Gershom/GPO)

Cook thanks Rivlin for his kind words, saying that he and his staff “ have an enormous admiration for Israel, not just as an important ally for the US, but as a place to do business.”

Apple has opened an R&D center in Herzliya, hiring dozens more engineers in recent months to fill positions there, according to Israeli media reports. According to sources in Apple’s Israeli operation, Apple has hired dozens of engineers who are “bringing with them knowledge that Apple does not currently possess, and they will get a finished product almost specifically made for them. It’s part of Apple’s new strategy of developing the technology it needs in-house, instead of relying on outside companies and contractors.”

Among the topics discussed by the two was the role of education in the advancement of weaker populations, and how Apple could help ensure that peripheral groups, like ultra-Orthodox Jews and Arabs, could become more integrated in Israel’s high-tech economy. “We must learn from you how to help our students also in difficult places, as you have done in many schools in the US,” says Rivlin.

— David Shamah