Letters to Steve_ Inside the E-Mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs - Mark Milian [1]
The desire to be chosen by Steve out of what was surely a stream of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of messages per day was so intense that some publications had written articles purporting to have tips for soliciting a response. Business Insider composed a how-to slideshow on this topic, although the author never received a reply to his test message. A satirical site similar to the Onion but devoted entirely to Apple-related gags (no joke) called Scoopertino (the name comes from Apple’s home base in Cupertino, California) ran the headline: “WikiLeaks releases 140,000 emails from Steve Jobs.” Ironically, an Apple employee was cited, and Steve Jobs referenced, in cables from the U.S. embassy in China released by WikiLeaks in 2011. Authentic dispatches directly from the office of Steve Jobs were harder to come by.
However, other websites besides Mac Rumors have uncovered real scoops on Steve notes. AppleInsider wrote hard-news reports based on Steve’s e-mailed “yeah’s” and “no’s.” Cult of Mac, an aptly named site swimming in a sea of Web shrines to Apple, went after its own. Another blog, 9to5Mac, also managed to get exclusive notes. Additionally, members of the mainstream media, including Fortune, Gizmodo and Wired, strived to get e-mails from Steve first. There is even a blog dedicated, like this book, to Steve Jobs’ e-mails. It is appropriately called Emails from Steve Jobs, and it, too, has beaten other websites in publishing a handful of his messages.
I’ve received a few as well. Some of the e-mails, at the time, did not seem newsworthy or could not be thoroughly and independently confirmed, and so I did not report on them. This book contains never-before-published e-mails from Steve Jobs, ones from my own archives and others that have surfaced through months of research. One of the messages I received includes the only on-the-record statement Apple has made about a widely-reported and apparently false assertion that the company joined a cabal to boycott Fox News’ Glenn Beck show.
The editors of the aforementioned blogs say they go to great efforts to verify the authenticity of these e-mails. They ask the sender to see headers, which contain a digital trail showing where the message traveled from. A computer analyst can compare the headers to known e-mails from Steve Jobs, although anyone who knows how to use Google could easily retrieve the same data and alter his forgery accordingly. Another strategy that Brian X. Chen, reporting for Wired, had used involves asking a source for the credentials to his e-mail account, and then logging in to see the e-mail exchange firsthand in its natural habitat. This is more difficult to fake, though not impossible.
In reality, there is no foolproof way to validate each of these e-mails. For many of the exchanges cited in this book, I have checked with reporters and alleged recipients of e-mails from Steve. Dubious messages were omitted. For the rest, like with Santa or magic, sometimes you’ve just got to believe.
Chapter 1
Return
Contrary to what Steve Jobs said about the iPad, there’s nothing really magical about it. It’s a computer, made of aluminum, glass and silicon, with a touchscreen. Tablets were around a decade before, and then after the iPad, Samsung Group, Sony Corp. and countless other electronics manufacturers have managed to clone Apple’s finger-friendly gadget with ease. The magic formula they haven’t been able to recreate, however, is Steve himself. Those companies lack a celebrity executive and with him, the cult that follows.
Steve had fine taste, charisma, sharp negotiation skills and a tireless work ethic. Long before stepping down as CEO, Steve took a promising bunch of hardworking executives, Tim Cook, Eddy Cue,