Letters to Steve_ Inside the E-Mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs - Mark Milian [12]
Most of these were mini announcements. “Yep,” Steve wrote on March 22, 2010, the iPhone would get a “universal inbox” feature in the Mail app, which combines all e-mail accounts into one section. It came later that year in a software update. “Sorry, no,” Steve wrote a few weeks later, Apple no longer planned to provide software updates to the original iPhone.
“It will come,” Steve wrote a month after that, about printing from the iPad, a wireless service that would be called AirPrint. The feature, which did not gain wide support immediately from printer manufacturers, became a regular subject of speculation on blogs for a brief period of time. “Nope,” AirPrint had not been pulled, Steve replied to an inquiry on November 10, 2010. That same day, he addressed another person’s distressed query, saying, “AirPrint has not been pulled. Don't believe everything you read.” Two weeks later, a customer named Stan wrote, “Dear Steve, you got me all hyped about AirPrint. Now with iOS 4.2 released, I find out that I can only print on 11 select printers. Seriously?!” Steve retorted: “Lots more coming soon. It’s what it takes to make a giant leap to driverless printing, which is huge.”
Mark Ford wrote Steve on the first of June 2010 to ask, on behalf of his wife who has poor eyesight, whether the iPhone would ever allow users to adjust the font size of text messages. “Yes, that exact feature is coming in iPhone OS 4 software this summer!” Steve replied. As for iPhone-to-Mac synchronization over Wi-Fi, which Rick Proctor asked about three weeks later: “Yep, someday,” Steve said. As it turns out, “someday” would be one of the biggest features shown off the next year. Similarly, a week after Mark’s message, someone named Chris asked about sending high-definition video from the iPhone to a computer wirelessly or to YouTube without compression. “You can upload them via a Mac or PC today. Over the air in the future,” Steve wrote. As for the rollout of AirPlay, Apple’s wireless transmission protocol that can beam a movie from the iPad to an Apple TV, Steve told a customer, “It’s all coming soon. Stay tuned.”
Even when Steve felt less confident that a feature will make it into a forthcoming software release, he offered his best answer. When asked on November 28, 2010 whether iOS would allow the Safari Web browser and third-party apps to send video wirelessly, Steve said, “Yep, hope to add these features to Airplay in 2011.” And Apple did. Two weeks later, Seth Walker inquired about whether iOS would let users transfer their saved game progress between their various devices, Steve replied, “I think so.”
Sometimes Steve said improvements were on the way that apparently weren’t priorities or that developers later changed their minds about including. For example, Conor Winders, the technical chief for a small development team called Redwind Software, wanted to know whether the revamped Apple TV, the set-top box unit that brings online video to the living room, would support the iTunes Extras and LPs, or whether he was wasting his money on those premium-priced versions of albums. “Coming,” Steve promised in 2010, though a year later, Apple still had not delivered.
Steve and a customer went back and forth on October 23, 2010 about whether the iPad would switch the function of its button on the side, from muting volume to locking the orientation of the display, which is a feature useful for reading in bed. “Yep,” Steve wrote, it would mute from then on. “Are you planning to make that a changeable option?” the customer replied. “Nope,” Steve said. Contrary to Steve’s definite response, it became an option in the iPad’s settings menu in a subsequent version of the software.
Steve fielded similar, but fewer, requests about Apple computers and servers. “Soon,” Steve said in response to Eugenij Sukharenko’s question about the Safari desktop browser supporting GPS location prompts. Often, these types