Letters to Steve: Inside the E-mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs

by Mark Milian

  With each jump from the rooftops around Foxconn, more people around the world began looking to the manufacturer and its partners, most notably Apple, for answers. Steve Jobs responded to one e-mail inquiry along those lines, as reported by Fortune: “Although every suicide is tragic, Foxconn's suicide rate is well below the China average. We are all over this.” Steve’s pen pal was not ready to let up, asking what he meant by being “all over this” and more broadly questioning Apple’s corporate social responsibility. “You should educate yourself. We do more than any other company on the planet: Apple - Supplier Responsibility,” Steve wrote, linking to a company report. But the writer was still hung up on one thing: “We are all over this?” Steve explained patiently, “It’s an American expression that means this has our full attention.” Playing teacher in this instance, Steve was willing to take on many roles in the confines of his inbox.

  The collective conscience of people who follow the machine manufacturing industry sighed heavily as it became obvious that the Western world’s gadget addiction was taking its toll on the people who make the little wonders. A dangerous trade overseen by wealthy warlords stands between the minerals needed for the internal components of these hardware and the companies that put their names on them. Some Western corporations, including Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Nokia and many others, banded together in an effort to boycott so-called conflict minerals and their suppliers.

  Conflict minerals consist of gold, tantalum, tin and tungsten mined in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, and to fund their ruthless wars, rebels sell them to partners in East Asia where they are used to manufacture all kinds of electronics. For example, tantalum stores energy in capacitors to power iPods, cell phones and digital cameras. Tungsten is used to manufacture the filaments that allow phones to vibrate. And a tiny bit of gold is used in connectors, relay contacts, soldered joints and connection strips as a corrosion-free conductor in almost every electronic device including the iPad, iPhone and iPod in order to support low voltages and currents.

  Wired reader Derick Rhodes questioned Steve Jobs on how Apple sourced the minerals in its products. Steve responded: “We require all of our suppliers to certify in writing that they use conflict few materials. But honestly there is no way for them to be sure. Until someone invents a way to chemically trace minerals from the source mine, it’s a very difficult problem.” Steve seemed frustrated at the idea that that there was a controversial part of his business relations that existed beyond the bounds of his control.

  Chapter 7

  Customer Service Officer

  Among chief executives, Steve Jobs was an outlier. CEOs of public companies are generally eccentrics. They work long hours and carry the weight of thousands of people’s financial security on their shoulders. One stupid comment can sink the value of the stock in minutes. They are the designated leaders, who reflect the company’s ethos, and can drive the direction of products and strategy. Steve was involved in practically every detail, from determining which industries Apple should invade to the material used for the iPhone’s screen. For a CEO to be a micromanager to the degree that Steve was is rare but not unheard of. However, few CEOs are willing to take the abuse involved in customer service, but that was a part of Apple’s business for which Steve exercised a great deal of attention and patience.

  By comparison, a representative for AT&T, Apple’s longtime carrier partner for the coveted iPhone, threatened a customer, who had twice e-mailed company CEO Randall Stephenson complaining about price hikes, with a cease-and-desist notice. “I don’t think even Steve Jobs can spin 2 GB for $25/month as a good thing for the consumer,” the customer, Giorgio Galante, wrote in his recap, as reported by Wired. Unlike other leaders, Steve was not only handling an unusual number of his company’s own basic customer-service inquiries, but he also fielded some of Randall’s, since the two were conjoined on various business interests relating to the iPhone and iPad. Apple requires that carriers funnel inquiries about the iPhone and iPad to Apple’s own staff rather than try to answer the questions themselves.

  When a customer asked Steve in 2008 why BlackBerry owners could tether their phones to their computers for wireless Internet access but the same could not be done with an iPhone, Steve wrote, “We agree, and are discussing it with ATT.” The feature eventually came. Asked about tethering an iPhone to an iPad on AT&T, Steve replied only, “No.” Steve consoled another AT&T customer, Mark Trapp, who expressed his frustration over his cell carrier’s plans to discontinue unlimited data plans. “I think its going to work out just fine for almost all customers. Try it,” Steve wrote, but he was less supportive in a message to another customer, Dennis Wurster, about the same matter: “It’s between you and ATT.”

  Steve’s proclivity for responding to e-mails, and the reputation that came with that, made his inbox a prominent target for customers looking to overstep rows of supervisors to get broken computers replaced and generous credit for service outages. This approach intensified as his legendary reputation and Apple’s customer base grew, and Apple took notice and repurposed the messages to be used as data points for internal use, evidenced by the MobileMe chart showing customer complaints.

  Long before that, however, Steve was extraordinarily embedded in handling customer complaints. On October 11, 1999, not long after Steve returned to a dying company and took on the title of interim CEO, he fielded an inquiry from a customer named David about iBook laptop shortages. “We are doing the best we can with a limited supply (which is finally now increasing). Please remember that some of the first pre-orders came from CompUSA,” Steve wrote.

  Dozens of stories have floated around the Web about the times when an e-mail to Steve Jobs yielded a phone call from an executive support team and an outcome that far exceeded reasonable expectations. In 1999, a customer got his G4 Tower desktop repaired after an e-mail to Steve resulted in a phone call from the oft-referenced Executive Relations team. In 2001, a student software developer was told by Apple support that, despite his sob story about dropping the hard drive connected to his laptop causing damage, they couldn’t resolve an issue that resulted from physical abuse. After writing to the CEO, he got a call from one of Steve’s associates who asked him several questions and then tempered his expectations by saying similarly that he did not meet the standards for a comped repair. But a month passed after he took his computer in for repairs, and there was still no charge from Apple. The customer recalled on a message board: “I contacted the support people, and they said the charges had been waived by ‘someone higher up.’ Uncle Steve must be smiling on me.”

  In 2006, Steve was initially defensive toward someone who had written to complain that the new PowerBook did not include a free copy of the iLife software suite. Steve asked if the computer itself was not good enough, and the customer said it was fantastic but that iLife would make it perfect. Soon, he received a copy of the software, as did every other person who purchased the computer. After a 2007 message to Steve, with the business watchdog blog the Consumerist copied on the e-mail, the sender got his laptop replaced alongside his damaged laptop so that he could copy files over from its hard drive. In 2010, a Chinese app maker was mugged in San Francisco while attending Apple’s developer conference. Company representatives found out about this and gave the man a new iPad, so he e-mailed Steve to thank him. “Safe travels home,” Steve replied.

  Steve Jobs didn’t often pick up the phone to go back and forth with customers, but Scott Steckley recalls a time when an e-mail to Steve, explaining how there seemed to be no end in sight to the wait for a computer repair, was met with a phone call. “Hi Scott, this is Steve,” he recalled.

  “Steve Jobs?” Scott asked.

  “Yeah,” Steve said. “I just wanted to apologize for your incredibly long wait. It’s really nobody’s fault. It’s just one of those things.”

  “Yeah, I understand.”

  Then, Steve explained that he expedited the repair for Scott. “I also wanted to thank
you for your support of Apple,” he said. “Well, I see how much equipment you own. It really makes my day to see someone who enjoys our products so much and who supports us in the good times and bad.”

  The old corporate slogan, “the customer is always right,” did not resonate with Steve Jobs. While he was very kind to people whom he felt deserved a break or who had supported him in darker times, Steve was by no means a pushover. He did not conceal his thoughts toward someone he believed was trying to skirt the system unfairly. For example, a customer complaining about Apple not honoring its warranty for his computer received the following response from Steve in 2008: “This is what happens when your MacBook Pro sustains water damage. They are pro machines and they don’t like water. It sounds like you’re just looking for someone to get mad at other than yourself.” Another customer named Tristan called App Store policies “a sham” because Apple wouldn’t refund his money. Steve said: “9 refunds already…. Who’s the sham now?”

  A Berkeley student complained to Steve about Apple customer service refusing to compensate him and not sufficiently explaining the reason for delaying the shipment of his iPad. Steve was not moved. “Sorry, we don’t give freebies to make up for product delays. We are shipping iPads as fast as we can. If that’s not fast enough for you, we are happy to cancel your order and give you anfull refund for what you have paid,” Steve wrote, apparently too hurried to spellcheck. He signed off with a likely unintentional taunt, “Sent from my iPad.”

  Worse than having to wait for a hot new product that’s already been paid for, as any gear head will tell you, is dropping the dough for a new gadget and then finding out that a brand new, cutting-edge version is coming out days or weeks later. Technology moves fast, faster than some people’s paychecks arrive. Ask Nate, an early adopter of the Apple TV who e-mailed Steve on November 30, 2010 when he discovered that it would not support the major new feature promoted in the latest version of the product, which happened to retail for a drastically cheaper $99 price. The feature he was referring to was AirPlay, which facilitates the streaming of music and video between two Apple machines. Steve reasoned: “It’s different technology. It does everything it did when you bought it.”

  David Wilkinson got a similar response on March 16, 2006 when he told Steve his sob story about the iMac, which Apple had just replaced with one that runs on a drastically different architecture made by Intel. “The iMac G5 is a splendid computer and will remain so for a long time to come. Not to worry,” Steve wrote. Apple continued to support that breed of computer for several years until the company and its partners phased them out.

  Besides giving people free stuff or chastising those looking to freeload, Steve Jobs offered personal technical support. In the summer of 2008, he responded to a customer’s concerns about disappearing apps. “Please make sure you’re running the updated software,” Steve suggested. Steve’s advice sometimes conflicted with conventional wisdom and guidance from Genius technicians at the Apple Store. A Genius clerk once told me that I should get in the habit of force-quitting the apps on my iPhone in order to improve performance and save battery. Alan Bonacossa asked Steve about this on July 29, 2010, and Steve said: “You don’t need to do that to save battery life. Trust the iPhone.”

  Beyond offering the final word on troubleshooting, Steve was uniquely able to provide the best explanations for why a product may not function the way a customer might want it to. For example, Erica (a woman e-mailer for a change!) sent a message to Steve saying that she understood why her iPhone 3G wasn’t updated to be compatible with the new processor-intensive multitasking feature; however, she couldn’t reason why she wasn’t given the option to change the background picture on her phone, a new feature for owners of the latest iPhone models. “The icon animation with backgrounds didn’t perform well enough,” Steve explained. The Apple auteur aimed for perfection and nothing less, including with the flick of onscreen icons.

  A customer-service inquiry that was sure to elicit a reply from Steve involved asking how to buy something. Steve loved making sure people could purchase his products. After discovering that TJ Maxx had started carrying iPads, Josh Cheney wrote Steve on November 19, 2010 asking whether Apple would match the discount prices at TJ Maxx and whether that store is even authorized to sell Apple products. Steve answered: “Nope. And nope.” Asked in April of that same year whether Best Buy would carry the iPad, Steve said only, “Yep.” A month earlier, he was asked more broadly which stores would carry the tablet and specifically whether the third-party authorized resellers would be included — all information that could be easily obtained from Apple’s large team of service representatives. Steve responded, “Initially at AppleRetail and online stores and Best Buy.”

  Steve exercised an exceptional amount of patience in the name of selling products he was enthusiastic about. Andrea Nepori sent Steve an e-mail asking whether the iPad would offer free e-books. “Yep,” Steve replied. Andrea learned later that he could have found the answer simply by checking the Apple website, but Steve took the time to respond anyway. (Though, Andrea questions whether it was really Steve who fielded the inquiry.) Apple went on to sell three million iPads in the first 80 days it was on the market despite inventory shortages worldwide. Whether or not that success and Apple’s consistently high marks in customer-satisfaction surveys had anything to do with Steve’s heightened attentiveness to customers’ direct requests, his excitement for a product shined brightly and was felt widely.

  Chapter 8

  Input Received

  Advice, answers, guidance, ideas and orders were things Steve Jobs would readily dole out. He was, however, not as good at receiving them. With few exceptions, he thought most people, especially those in the technology industry, had things backwards. He did not commonly admire rivals’ products. What Apple did, according to Steve, was take things that were already out there, be it portable MP3 players, cloud services or something he just “saw” in his mind, and make them “just work.”

  Focus groups were not a part of Apple’s repertoire. As was the case for all products under his reign, Steve said no consumer research went into the development of the iMac, his first big product launch after coming back to Apple in the late-1990s. “For something this complicated, it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why a lot of people at Apple get paid a lot of money, because they’re supposed to be on top of these things,” Steve said in a 1998 interview with BusinessWeek for the debut of the iMac.

  Steve would not succumb to pressure to release products if they weren’t up to his standards. The joke around Silicon Valley in 1987, according to the New York Times, was that his computer company NeXT would be renamed Eventually, for its chronic delays. H. Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire and unsuccessful U.S. presidential candidate who made an unsolicited investment in NeXT, had admired Steve’s eye for setting things a certain way. “Steve and his whole NeXT team are the darndest bunch of perfectionists I’ve ever seen,” he told the Times. Two years after that interview, Ross told BusinessWeek, “They spent an inordinate amount of time striving for perfection.”

  Steve’s reliance on his own taste and instincts stuck with him until the end, although he did slowly add more people to his trusted inner circle. He annually appointed a tight knit group of executives, managers and standout engineers as part of the Top 100, who would get together at offsite locations, and discuss products and ideas. The Top 100 are among the first people to see new products outside of top execs and the teams that built them.

  After Fortune reported on the existence of this secret club, much to the disdain of Apple employees left out of the field trips, Steve acknowledged the Top 100 in an e-mail to a woman who contacted him to report how her albino daughter was using the iPad to read. (The condition affected her eyesight, and the iPad allows users to adjust the size of onscreen text.) Steve asked for a high-resolution photo of the woman’s daughter, and w
rote: “Thanks for sharing your experience with me. Do you mind if I read your email to a group of our top 100 leaders at Apple?" The mother of Holly Bligh shared her story with the Australian Herald Sun, and said, “I never thought we would hear back.”

  In an interview at a conference, Steve Jobs tried to dispel the prevalent belief that Apple was run like a dictatorship. “We’re organized like a startup. We’re the biggest startup on the planet. And we all meet for three hours once a week, and we talk about everything we’re doing, the whole business. And there’s tremendous teamwork at the top of the company, which filters down to tremendous teamwork through the company. And teamwork is dependent on trusting the other folks to come through with their part without watching them all the time, but trusting that they’re going to come through with their parts. And that’s what we do really well. And we’re great at figuring out how to divide things up into these great teams that we have, and all work on the same thing, touch bases frequently, and bring it all together into a product. We do that really well. And so what I do all day is meet with teams of people, and work on ideas and solve problems to make new products, to make new marketing programs, whatever it is.” When the interviewer jokingly asked whether Steve wins every argument, he said, “If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions, and you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay.”