Walter Isaacson’s biography of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs is out, and it revealed how Jobs was left feeling ‘annoyed and depressed’ following the iPad announcement back in January 2010.
Isaacson recounts how Jobs had received hundreds of emails to his personal email account in the twenty four hours following the announcement and how ‘most of them were complaining.’
‘There’s no USB cord! There’s no this, no that. Some of them are like, “**** you, how can you do that?” I don’t usually write people back, but I replied, “Your parents would be so proud of how you turned out.” And some don’t like the iPad name, and on and on. I kind of got depressed today. It knocks you back a bit.’
The name, in particular, was cause cause for a lot of the negativity, and comments about how it sounded like feminine hygiene product reverberated across social media networks.
Isaacson tells how the ‘public carping’ continued until the iPad was released in April of 2010 and people actually got their hands on the new tablet … a tablet that would not only change the tablet landscape, but the face of computing as a whole.
The book also reveals that Jobs was dissatisfied with the original iPad ads, thinking that they looked like Pottery Barn commercials.
Jobs told Isaacson:
‘It was easy to explain what the iPod was - a thousand songs in your pocket - which allowed us to move quickly to the iconic silhouette ads. But it was hard to explain what an iPad was. We didn’t want to show it as a computer, and yet we didn’t want to make it so soft that it looked like a cute TV. The first set of ads showed we didn’t know what we were doing. They had a cashmere and Hush Puppies feel to them.’
Even for Apple (maybe especially for Apple) advertising matters.
