Tim Cook starts his morning reading comments from Apple customers

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Tim Cook with a 2018 WWDC scholarship winner.
Apple’s CEO pays attention to what people outside the company are saying about its products.
Screencap: Apple

If you’ve ever wondered if anyone at Apple ever sees the online comments people post about iPhone, Mac, etc., you can rest easy: No less a person than CEO Tim Cook reads them every day.

And you might be surprised at how much time he spends doing so.

“I like to take the first hour and go through user comments and things like this that sort of focus on the external people that are so important to us,” Cook said in a recent Axios interview.

The Apple executive has time to read these comments because he gets up at 4 a.m. After immersing himself in the complaints of Apple users for 60 minutes, Cook heads off to the gym for an hour of exercise. Only after that does he officially start work.

Tim Cook uses Screen Time

There’s no word on what type of device he uses first thing in the morning to read user comments. But it’s probably not his iPhone, because Cook is cutting down his smartphone use with the help of Screen Time. (That’s a new feature in iOS 12 for monitoring and limiting how you spend time on your iPhone or iPad.)

“My notifications are declining,” Cook told Axios. “The number of times I pick up a device are declining and the only reason they are is because we built this functionality into our operating system and I now know what I was doing.”

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