Apple’s Tim Cook visits Macron in epic France trip

According to a statement from the Elysée palace, Cook was warmly welcomed by the President, and was happy to discuss the sensitive and often-controversial issue of large companies’ tax payments (or the lack thereof) - including of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (often called ‘GAFA’, for short) - reported French news source 20 Minutes.

The men are also said to have discussed education, notably in relation to Apple’s “Everyone Can Code” initiative - which seeks to enable anyone to learn, write and teach computer coding - and also celebrated the imminent arrival of an Apple team at newly-opened Parisian start-up incubator campus, Station F (backed by Xavier Neil and home to over 1,000 startups).

Cook, who was visiting France for the second time this year, also took the time to pay homage to the fallen soldiers at the World War II memorials in Normandy.

In a tweet, Cook said he was “honoring those who made the ultimate sacrifice”.

The Apple head - who took over from the late Steve Jobs as CEO of Apple in 2011 - also visited French company Eldim, which is based near Caen and is credited with having created the optical technology that is used in Apple’s most recent iPhone - the X.

Thanks to my friends at Eldim, a team of talented engineers and craftspeople helping make iPhone possible. Bravo pour votre travail! pic.twitter.com/hEpxD3iBGf

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) October 9, 2017

This uses face recognition technology to lock and unlock the phone, compared to the digital fingerprint (Touch ID) used in previous models.

Cook, who mainly documented his trip on social network Twitter, also had time to visit a team of French-based entrepreneurs, who have seen six million downloads of their app, Coach Guitar.

Très impressionné par l'expérience @CoachGuitar. Congratulations on 6M downloads! We can't wait to see what you do next. pic.twitter.com/O7RIjusuzh

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) October 9, 2017