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In 2017, two years after the launch of the Apple Watch, the company released a marketing video featuring people who wrote to Cook about how the product had helped them. It included a man who had used his smartwatch to call emergency services after a car accident, a father whose daughter was diabetic and who now included his blood glucose readings and shared them with family members, etc.
But letters are used for a lot more than marketing. They can also influence product decisions.
According to people familiar with how the process works, Apple Cook has an badistant who reads the mail, sends some mail for his personal attention, and shares the others with a group distribution list of the executives of the teams involved. They transmit the letters to their reports, and so on throughout the chain. Many of these "Dear Tim" letters are ultimately sent by grbadroots employees, according to one current employee and two former employees.
The letters had a particularly important impact on the Apple Health Team.
After the launch of the Apple Watch in 2015, the company has put forward various features including communications, entertainment and monitoring of health and fitness.
But then, the missives started pouring in from users, describing how the device had alerted them to potentially serious health issues and even saved lives. After that, Apple began to put more emphasis on the watch than on the health features.
One of the first stories involved a teenager, Paul Houle, Jr., who noticed that his heart rate was double what he should be after football training, prompting him to be treated. It turned out that he was suffering from a serious health problem, which was already starting to cause damage.
Tim Cook personally called Houle and his family after hearing about history, ABC News reported. Apple declined to comment at the time.
A former employee described the letters as a surprise, as no one expected heart rate monitoring to identify irregularities that indicated more serious problems. Another former employee said the letters about the heart showed that Apple could have a much more positive impact on health than any other member of society had already realized.
The letters were also helpful in maintaining employee morale. One person pointed out how important the letters were to engineers, who did not have an external role and did not meet users regularly. Apple is notoriously secretive, and so many employees can not talk much about their work, even to their close friends and family.
The subject of the letters "Dear Tim" was once again addressed at a rare public event for the Apple Health Team earlier this month.
"It was a new day for Apple when the letters began to arrive," said Julz Arny, who works on special projects for fitness at Apple, at a recent roundtable held in the store Apple Store of the company in San Francisco.
"People did not write letters of love (in the same way) about Calendar," Arny explained. "Everyone internally finds it very exciting."
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