Customers' 'Dear Tim' emails have big impact within Apple

Customers' personal emails to Apple CEO Tim Cook actually do get read, and are passed around as employee motivation and inspiration for future features — particularly within the Apple Health team.

Even preceding Tim Cook's tenure at Apple, customers have emailed Apple's top brass about their experiences with Apple's products — good or bad. Sometimes, customers even get responses back in emails or personal phone calls. Tim Cook reaffirmed Apple's commitment to the Mac mini in one of his responses while everyone awaited the future of the mini line.

These "Dear Tim" emails, as they've recently been dubbed, have a much bigger impact within Apple than most would expect.

With the launch of the Apple Watch, which actually had a profound impact on improving or saving people's lives, these emails have increased in volume as customer's share their stories.

Apple Watch Series 4

"It was a new day for Apple when the letters started coming in," noted Julz Arny during Apple's recent American Heart Month event at a San Francisco Apple Store.

CNBC outlines the internal process for these emails which involves a personal assistant whose sole job entails reading these received emails according to sources familiar with the process. Emails that are believed to be especially important are forwarded to Cook for personal attention while others are sent to distribution lists of executives on various teams within Apple.

The emails live on further, after being disseminated down into individual teams and even amongst the rank-and-file as motivation.

After the initial launch of Apple Watch, Apple promoted health and fitness features to be one of the most selling points of the device. Internal sources even partially credit "Dear Tim" emails for the promotion of the health features.

Aside from shaping features, the emails are important for morale, according to CNBC. Between Apple's secrecy and the non-customer-facing positions within Apple, it can be difficult for those like engineers to directly hear or see the results of their work.

36 Comments

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leftoverbacon 15 Years · 64 comments

About 5 years ago

This is good news!

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wonkothesane 12 Years · 1738 comments

I wonder how many such emails, say, Howard A. Willard III, CEO of Altria Group (formerly known as PhilipMorris), might receive.
How do you feel about it, Howard?

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racerhomie3 7 Years · 1264 comments

I believe the Apple Watch & Apples similar health initiatives will help America & the whole world in general. Thats why I utterly hate that countries like India, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh,Argentina & european countries put up tariffs as high as 50% on Apple products.

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lkrupp 19 Years · 10521 comments

racerhomie3 said:

I believe the Apple Watch & Apples similar health initiatives will help America & the whole world in general. Thats why I utterly hate that countries like India, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh,Argentina & european countries put up tariffs as high as 50% on Apple products.

I think the time is coming when companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google are going to have to decide whether they are American companies or not. There’s an article out there now about a bunch of Microsoft employees around the world demanding the company end its contract with the U.S. Department of Defense. They say they don’t want to work on weapons for the U.S. military. It has to do with Microsoft’s HoloLens product being adapted for military use. So is Microsoft an American company or not? And if they don’t see themselves as American companies then why should they be protected by America’s government and laws? What if Microsoft had entered into a similar contract with Russia or China’s military? I despise globalization and the one world government some are clamoring for.

ireland 18 Years · 17436 comments

Some make a difference. Some do not.

Still no increase is baseline free iCloud tier, from that measly 5 GB. And still no—the feature I want more than any else—cross-platform iMessage. No WhatsApp, no fb mess, just iMessage from my phone and Mac to anyone I out there who wants to download the app. Out of the box messaging. That's all I ask. Yes, it will cost Apple money to run this, but this is not an issue for them. Out of the box device experience should trump everything else.

Also, iMessage activation sucks (it's unreliable) and it costs money. Switch to Signal-style phone number activation and get rid of passwords for iMessage signing and activation.

/rant