My Amazing Email Exchange With Steve Jobs

By Ryan Tate

I didn't plan to pick a fight with Steve Jobs last night. It just sort of happened: An iPad advertisement ticked me off; I sent the Apple CEO an angry email; he told me about "freedom from porn."

The electronic debate proceeded from there.

Of course, there was a bit more to it than that. There's the context: Jobs' legal fight with my employer Gawker Media, over the handling of an iPhone prototype; my long-simmering worries about Apple's growing power to limit self expression through its lockdown on iPad apps; and the fact that my wife, who might normally (and quite sensibly) veto the idea of spending Friday night sending email flames, was out of town.

So in retrospect I was primed to lash out. But there was some serendipity too: Watching a new episode of 30 Rock on my digital video recorder, I somehow failed to skip over an Apple ad I'd never seen before, one that billed the iPad as nothing less than "a revolution." You can see an excerpt of the ad at the bottom of this post.

With a Stinger cocktail at my side, I dashed off a short, pointed question to Jobs' well-known email address.

A few hours later—after midnight here in California—he got back to me. And I got back to him. And so on.


Read the rest here.