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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