‘Katie Knows Everything’

From the DF archive, my piece in 2014 remarking upon her retirement from Apple, with an anecdote from the iPhone 4 “antennagate” press conference in 2010:

I was wearing a large SLR camera on a strap around my neck. As I filed in to find a seat, I was offered a choice: if I wanted to take photos during the event, I could sit toward the back; if I were willing to forgo taking photos, I could sit up front in the third row. I only had my camera with me on a lark — the advantages of publishing a website that runs photographs only rarely — so I took the seat in the third row. The first two rows, as usual, were occupied by senior Apple executives and employees.

As I took my seat, Katie Cotton, sitting in the second row, smiled and greeted me. “Hi John, glad you could make it. How’s the cold?”

I was feeling fine, the cold not much more than a memory at that point, and told her so. But I had to ask, laughing, “How did you even know I had a cold?”

Before she could answer, Greg Joswiak, sitting directly in front of me, turned around. “John, Katie knows everything.”

★ Tuesday, 11 April 2023