Edible Apple

In the virtual world, Steve Jobs is perhaps best known for his extremely terse and to-the-point email responses to consumers. With Tim Cook now firmly in place as Apple CEO, some have wondered if he would be as open to responding to user emails as Jobs was. Though to be fair, Jobs’ email responses were sporadic at best and, again, extremely short.

MacRumors writes:

Cook has clearly been flooded with emails over the past few days, many of which have offered him congratulations on his new position. Notably, Cook does seem to be taking the time to respond to those emails, suggesting that he may indeed be interested in personal communication with Apple customers. Most of the responses so far seem to have been of a simple nature thanking the senders, although some have included a bit more detail relevant to the senders’ content.

So the answer thus far appears to be yes. Cook, like Jobs, appears open to interacting with emailers, albeit with terse responses – and who can blame him given the voluminous amount of email he likely recieves.

One commenter on idownloadblog claims to have had an email exchange with Cook regarding his experience using Apple products to communicate with his family members back home. Cook reportedly thanked him for serving.

And below we see a congratulatory email sent to Cook along with the War Eagle battle cry of Auburn football, Cook’s alma mater.

Regarding Jobs’ long list of email replies, one of his most famous responses was to a user complaining about the now infamous reception issues associated with the iPhone 4 antenna.

Their email exchange went as follows:

Hi Steve,

So, um, just got my iPhone 4. Its lovely and all, but this ‘bridge the two antennae to kill your reception’ thing seems to be a bit serious. If I bridge them with my hand or with a piece of metal the bars slowly drop to ‘Searching…’ and then ‘No Service’.

Its kind of a worry. Is it possible this is a design flaw?

Regards

– Rory Sinclair

Jobs reply:

Nope. Just don’t hold it that way.

Rory’s follow-up:

Actually, its not calls that concern me, but i’ve just been writing a text and its very natural for me as a right-handed person to hold it that way, with the part of my hand at the base of my thumb covering the point the antennae meet, and it kills the reception each time.

I mean, pretty much as soon as i move my hand it comes back, but its pretty crazy… is this the reason Bumpers exist?

– Rory

Jobs replies again:

Just don’t hold it that way then.

Rory answers back:

Well, yeah, thats what i’ll do, but you have to admit thats a workaround, yeah? I mean, normally there aren’t limits to how you can hold a phone.

I seriously dig the phone, its totally amazing, but I think this is what many would call a design flaw.

– Rory

Jobs’ final reply:

Sure there are – every phone has these areas of sensitivity, depending on the location of the antenna. Some phones even ship with labels warning customers to not cover certain areas with their hands.