Letters to Steve_ Inside the E-Mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs - Mark Milian [20]
In another ambiguous circumstance, a San Bernardino, California high school student named Nathan wrote Steve a gushing note three months before Christmas 2010 to ask whether the oft-delayed white version of the iPhone 4 would arrive in time for “Xmas.” Nathan mentioned that Apple had said the white iPhone would be released later in the year. Steve cryptically responded, “Christmas is later this year.” After reading this, bloggers foamed at the mouth and debated whether Steve was making a wisecrack, whether he was making a play on an old expression to imply that Nathan’s Christmas gift would come later than expected, or whether Steve was avoiding the question. Regardless of what it was, Apple delayed the product again, pushing it to spring 2011, and finally delivered on April 28, 2011. The tagline Apple used for the product, whose early prototypes suffered from problems associated with the camera’s flash component and from the proximity sensor on the front, was, “Finally.”
Taking such a confident, perhaps arrogant, stance in order to reassure a customer can backfire on the company. The white iPhone was a blunder but not one with much consequence. A customer named Sean Berry wrote Steve Jobs on August 8, 2008 about a widespread problem with a chipset from NVIDIA Corp. that Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. offered to replace for affected customers. Some criticized Apple for not acknowledging the problem in its computers. Steve said, “We used a different chip than the ones affected.” However, two months later, Apple finally acknowledged that some MacBook Pro computers were faulty, and offered free repairs or refunds. Apple pinned the blame on NVIDIA for the delay in identifying the problem, saying that while the chipmaker had assured Apple that its products were not affected, an investigation led by Apple found otherwise.
In Steve’s third act, Apple appeared less concerned with computers. The iPod quickly came to make up about half of Apple’s revenues, and the moneymakers later came from mobile phones and tablets. This refocusing was embodied in a corporate rebranding in January 2007 when Apple Computer Inc. changed its name to Apple Inc.
When Steve announced the iPad 2, he riffed on his “post-PC era” concept: “A lot of folks in this tablet market are rushing in, and they're looking at this as the next PC. The hardware and the software are done by different companies, and they’re talking about speeds and feeds just like they did with PCs. And our experience and every bone in our body says that that is not the right approach to this; that these are post-PC devices that need to be even easier to use than a PC; that need to be even more intuitive than a PC; and where the software and the hardware and the applications need to intertwine in an even more seamless way than they do on a PC.” Even in 1996, before returning to Apple, Steve told Forbes: “If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it’s worth, and get busy on the next great thing. … The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.”
Contrary to Apple’s actions and Steve’s sage-like monologues that concern the fervent followers of the company, executives publicly maintained that computers, too, were important to the company. Apple held an event at its headquarters in Cupertino called Back to the Mac in October 2010 where Steve introduced new MacBook Air laptops. Tim Cook, then the operating chief, prefaced by saying how important computers still are to Apple and how the Mac made up one-third of Apple’s revenues in 2009 and how if Apple had spun off a computer division, it would rank 110 on the Fortune 500 list. The presentation provided opportunities for some chest beating, but mostly, it felt like Apple was giving some attention to the long-neglected Mac cult.
These disciples are perhaps the most intimately familiar with Apple and were the most adept at staying on Steve Jobs’ radar. They constantly sent Steve e-mails. Readily, Steve put their minds at ease, but meanwhile, his focus clearly remained on other parts of the business that