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

by Mark Milian

  From: Ryan Tate

  To: Steve Jobs

  If Dylan was 20 today, how would he feel about your company?

  Would he think the iPad had the faintest to do with “revolution?”

  Revolutions are about freedom.

  From: Steve Jobs

  To: Ryan Tate

  Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin’, and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.

  Apparently unsatisfied with this response, Ryan shot back with a lengthy missive implying that Apple’s decision not to carry Adobe’s Flash video protocol on its mobile devices was a part of Steve’s personal vendetta regarding business disagreements with Adobe in the 1990s. Apple’s ban on Flash made it difficult for some publishers to offer their works as iPad apps. “I’d rather have a Wired magazine app that has some interactivity rather than one that is a glorified PDF,” Ryan wrote. “And you know what? I don’t want ‘freedom from porn.’ Porn is just fine! I think my wife would agree.” Steve partook in another round with Ryan, replying eight minutes later: “Wired is doing a native Cocoa app. So is almost every publisher. And you might care more about porn when you have kids…” (Cocoa is the application programming interface for Apple’s operating systems.)

  Steve had addressed the pornography restriction in a previous e-mail that had been published the month before the unlikely exchange with Gawker. A customer named Matthew wrote to Steve saying he had a “philosophical issue” with how Apple conducts its business in regards to the company rejecting acclaimed political cartoonist Mark Fiore’s app and about locking out pornographic apps. “Apple’s role isn’t moral police,” Matthew proclaimed. Steve retorted: “Fiore’s app will be in the store shortly. That was a mistake. However, we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy and Android phone.” The message, typo aside, was clear.

  Ryan Tate wasn’t done with his tipsy tirade. In his next e-mail, Ryan moved onto other topics and finally hinted at his employment with a media company by name-dropping his boss, Nick Denton, who founded and publishes Gawker Media websites. Ryan did not say he was a reporter. He and Steve debated over Flash some more and over publishers’ perception that, according to Ryan, “they HAVE to” spend resources on developing apps tailored to the iPad.

  From: Steve Jobs

  To: Ryan Tate

  Wait - of course they don’t have to. They don’t need to publish on the iPad if they don’t want to. No one is forcing them. But it appears they DO want to.

  There are almost 200,000 apps in the App Store, so something must be going alright. The magazine apps will be far better in the end because they are written native. We’ve seen this movie before.

  Gosh, why are you so bitter over a technical issue such as this? Its not about freedom, its about Apple trying to do the right thing for its users. Users, developers and publishers can do whatever they like - they don’t have to buy or develop or publish on iPads if they don’t want to. This seems like its your issue, not theirs.

  The two sparred for one final round in the heated e-mail argument. Ryan Tate compared Apple to Microsoft, for the time when the software giant required developers to rewrite their apps for a new operating system, and Ryan again hinted at his employment at Gawker and affiliation with Gizmodo, saying he doesn’t “like Apple’s pet police force literally kicking in my co-workers’ doors.” That refers to a report saying that California law enforcement officers forcibly entered the home of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen in April 2010.

  From: Steve Jobs

  To: Ryan Tate

  You are so misinformed. No one kicked in any doors. You’re believing a lot of erroneous blogger reports.

  Microsoft had (has) every right to enforce whatever rules for their platform that they want. If people don’t like it, they can write for another platform, which some did. Or they can buy another platform, which some did.

  As for us, we’re just doing what we can to try and make (and preserve) the user experience we envision. You can disagree with us, but our motives are pure.

  By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?

  In this series of late-night, combative e-mails, Steve Jobs shines a light on his philosophy. His admiration for Bob Dylan and the messages in his songs had long been known, but they weren’t just ideals for Steve; he believed he was a revolutionary. Steve may not have had his eye on civil rights or war (putting aside his early-1980s speech about nuclear bombs), but his mantras involved remaking industries in a way Steve saw fit, to benefit regular people, “mere mortals,” as he called them.

  Steve also believed, as any successful capitalist should, in the will of the free market and that if companies are acting dumb or unfairly, consumers will punish them for it. “If the market tells us we’re making the wrong choices, we listen to the market,” Steve elaborated at the All Things Digital conference in 2010. The onus is on Apple to take risks with products and to shape them in a way that is best, he said. “They’re paying us to make those choices. That’s what a lot of customers pay us to do, is to try to make the best products we can. And if we succeed, they’ll buy them, and if we don’t, they won’t. And it’ll all work itself out. So far, I’d have to say that people seem to be liking iPads. You know?”

  At that conference, Steve was asked in an onstage interview about the interaction with Gawker’s Ryan Tate. Steve explained, with a tinge of animus in his voice: “He never identified himself as a journalist. But I was working late one night. It was actually, like, two in the morning, I think. And I was working on — I’m making a presentation next Monday — and I was working on that presentation, and this guy starts e-mailing me these obnoxious emails, and I, you know, I’m just enough of a sucker that I want to, like, straighten this guy’s thinking out. So I start to respond to him, and he responds back. He’s not, you know, he’s no dummy, and he’s responding back, and we got in this conversation. It was kind of entertaining. And then he publishes it. So you know, that’s OK.”

  Steve wasn’t alone in his suggestion that Ryan Tate had stepped over the line when he failed to clearly disclose in the conversation that he’s a reporter and then published the e-mails. Anthony de Rosa of Reuters asks, “Why does everyone who e-mails with Steve Jobs think they have the right to republish their conversations?” Craig Kanalley, an editor at the Huffington Post, reasons: “Ryan never explicitly identifies himself as from Gawker, though yes, he drops enough hints as the thread goes on. It turned out to be an exclusive Q&A with the Apple CEO. One Jobs didn’t necessarily sign off on (and would never after all of this). Ethically, the whole thing just seems flaky.”

  Gawker, ever the thorn in Steve Jobs’ side, drummed up a short-lived controversy around another conversation with Steve. Though, in this one, the e-mailer did describe herself as a journalist or at least, an aspiring one. The blog published Steve’s e-mail chat with Chelsea Kate Isaacs, who, as a journalism student at Long Island University in September 2010, was assigned to write an article about her school giving iPads to freshmen and transfer students. Chelsea was furious that Apple’s public relations department had ignored her six phone calls, and she expressed those frustrations in a lengthy message to Steve. (Technology reporters for any publication below the top tier would sympathize with Chelsea.)

  Steve did respond, but it was not the type of comment Chelsea was looking for. “Our goals do not include helping you get a good grade. Sorry,” Steve wrote. In Chelsea’s follow-up, she hopped the line between polite and passive aggressive, suggesting that it should be Apple’s job to respond to all inquiries. Steve was not swayed: “Nope. We have over 300 million users and we can't respond to their requests unless they involve a problem of some kind. Sorry.” Chelsea pushed further, saying she is a customer and does have a
problem that requires an answer from Apple’s media relations department. Steve had apparently lost any modicum of patience he may have had before. “Please leave us alone,” he wrote.

  Steve Jobs didn’t have much of a soft spot for education, despite starting a failed venture called NeXT designed to build computers for educational institutions, giving a commencement speech for Stanford and marrying a graduate of that school who held a memorial service there after he died. Steve, a college dropout, told the Computerworld Honors Program in 1995 that “school was pretty hard for me” because “I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.” For a role model to express such an opinion publicly requires a sort of different thinking. The reaction to that type of outburst wasn’t always positive, even given Steve’s eccentric status, and he dealt with the reactions in unusual ways.

  The “think different” mentality, as it was dubbed in a blockbuster advertising slogan endorsed by Steve Jobs after his return to Apple in the late-1990s, is a competitive advantage, as Steve had said on several occasions. His antics of skewering rivals during earnings calls or at conferences (he compared iTunes for Windows to “giving a glass of ice water to someone in Hell” in an interview just before he was set to appear onstage with Microsoft’s Bill Gates) also extended to e-mail.

  Years after he made the “ice water” comment, at the same series of conventions put on by Wall Street Journal staffers, Steve did not get worked up in his evaluation of how Apple’s relationship with Google had begun to break down. “They decided to compete with us,” he summarized in 2010. “Just because we’re competing with somebody doesn’t mean we have to be rude.” But in e-mails, he was more candid. He embraced a fan named Bryan Webster who wrote Steve with a question about Apple’s future plans for the iPhone that concluded, “Fuck the google android team.” Steve replied, “You won’t be disappointed.” The next day, tech enthusiast Brian Kelleher wrote Steve challenging him on whether Android was leapfrogging the iPhone. “Not a chance,” Steve wrote back. When a British customer contacted Steve to ask whether iTunes and the iPhone would support the facial recognition and location tagging tools implemented in Google’s Picasa photo organizer software, Steve wrote, “No, but iPhoto on the Mac has much better Faces and Places features.”

  New challengers to Apple ebbed and flowed, but the rivalry with Microsoft persisted. Ben Rosen, the former Compaq chief, had a long friendship with Steve, but the two fell out of touch for many years. Ben wrote Steve a friendly note in 2007, and shortly after reemerging as CEO following a medical leave, Steve took one of his signature digs at Microsoft.

  From: Benjamin M. Rosen

  Subject: 30 years later -- from Ben Rosen

  Date: June 4, 2007 9:06 a.m.

  To: Steve Jobs

  Hi Steve,

  When you created and then showed me the Apple II in late 1977, little did I know how much it would change my life -- to a much more exciting one.

  Well, after a 20-plus year interlude with that other OS (necessitated by my Compaq involvement), I thought you'd be pleased to know that for the last few years I've returned to my roots. I'm once again an avid Apple user and evangelist.

  Imagine, Ben Rosen, former Compaq Chairman, now a Mac enthusiast!

  Warm regards,

  Ben

  From: Steve Jobs

  Subject: Re: 30 years later -- from Ben Rosen

  Date: August 1, 2007 7:58 p.m.

  To: Benjamin M. Rosen

  Ben,

  Sorry for my delayed reply - I was on a much needed family vacation for the past three weeks.

  Wow - this news makes my day! I'm glad to hear it. I hope you like what we've done with the Mac. I'm biased, of course, but I think its light years ahead of Windows.

  How are you doing? We haven't seen each other in years, but I remember the times we spent together very fondly.

  All the best,

  Steve

  Steve Jobs spurned manufactured outrage. When an irate Swiss man named Paul Shadwell fumed over Apple delaying the release of the iPad internationally and claimed that Steve was “deliberately pulling the wool over the rest of the worlds eyes,” Steve retorted: “Are you nuts? We are doing the best we can. We need enough units to have a responsible and great launch.” Steve seemed to believe that most conspiracies were perpetuated by an attention-hungry media and that they did not warrant a comment from himself or from Apple — that is, until the chorus of naysayers became too loud.

  Such a mob formed when members discovered that they were unable to hold a call on their new iPhone 4. As a result, they called Apple out loudly on a defect in its design. Apple was boasting about the glass-and-metal device’s innovative antenna placed along the exterior of the hardware, but the sleek, attractive design had a major flaw. When covering certain areas with a finger or palm, attenuation diminishes the phone’s cellular reception. Customers noticed on the day the product hit stores and started blogging in protest. On launch day, a customer sent Steve Jobs an e-mail, and his bizarre solution was, “Just avoid holding it in that way.” Two days later, the complaints continued, and Steve responded to another: “There is no reception issue. Stay tuned.”

  A few days after that, Steve allegedly got into an argument with a difficult customer, Jason Burford, though the authenticity of the exchange was later denied by an Apple public relations representative speaking with Fortune. “No, you are getting all worked up over a few days of rumors. Calm down,” Steve allegedly said in the first message in the exchange published by the blog Boy Genius Report. “You are most likely in an area with very low signal strength,” Steve said in the second. “You may be working from bad data. Not your fault. Stay tuned. We are working on it.”

  Apple did not address the problem publicly, not counting the e-mails, until a couple of weeks after the phone’s debut was marred by the incident and while reports had been steadily rolling in. About three weeks after the iPhone 4 launch and prompted by a less-than-stellar review from Consumer Reports, Steve arranged a news conference where the message was that there was no antenna issue but that Apple would give free cases to customers anyway in order to prevent users from attenuating the antenna with their fingers.

  Steve’s presentation, which was later broadcasted on Apple’s website, contained some patronizing remarks aimed at the media, but it wasn’t until the question-and-answer session that Steve’s statements began dripping with condescension. It’s no mystery why Apple’s public relations team decided to omit that portion of the news conference from its online posting. Steve said his team was “stunned and upset by the Consumer Reports stuff,” referring to the nonprofit publication’s determination that the iPhone 4 contained a serious design flaw. He portrayed himself as the victim, saying it is human nature for people to want to tear down those who are successful. Steve complained that the news media relentlessly beats down high-profile companies in the quest for controversy and readers’ attention. “I wish we could have done this in the first 48 hours, but then you wouldn’t have had so much to write about,” Steve concluded. He noted that for some customers e-mailing him about troubles, Steve had forwarded the messages onto Apple’s antenna engineers and in some cases, sent engineers to the people’s homes.

  As Apple’s market value increased, so did criticisms that it was growing on the backs of Chinese workers. Apple employs the services of the Foxconn Technology Group, a subsidiary of Taiwan’s manufacturing juggernaut Hon Hai group, to build many of its products. Foxconn employs almost 1 million workers in South and Central America, Eastern Europe and Asia with about a third of them based in factory campuses designed to live and work in Shenzhen, China. Like with many factories in industrializing countries, Foxconn’s work environment is not particularly pleasant: long hours, cramped conditions and monotony. Many of the workers are young and inexperienced, unaccustomed to living away from home in a corporate
campus.

  A year earlier, Foxconn logistics worker Sun Danyong made international headlines when the 25-year-old man who worked at Foxconn in Shenzhen, China, jumped to his death. During the summer of 2009, Sun was among thousands of workers busy manufacturing iPhones and other electronics. When a prototype went missing, Foxconn investigators questioned and humiliated Sun. Amidst the controversy on July 16, 2009, he sent messages to close friends and then jumped from the 12th floor of his apartment building. Over the next year, eighteen Foxconn workers attempted suicide, and of those, fourteen died.