I know it's a profoundly different area of the industry, but it's reasonably common practice in videogames (PC gaming, at least) for official spokespeople, even

I know it's a profoundly different area of the industry, but it's reasonably common practice in videogames (PC gaming, at least) for official spokespeople, even designers, and very occasionally developers, to engage with the community, on at least the general zeitgeist of its concerns. ex: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/blizztracker/ http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/blizztracker/ And even in more "traditional" and supposedly conservative industries... I could find some references for you but I don't think I'd need to given how widely-covered some of these have been, of the customer support PR coups that have been achieved over social media in general (primarily Twitter and Reddit; at least in my personal experience). It is obviously less structured than an archived, time-ordered, hierarchical, and easily-searchable forum designed for permanence, and I don't have the slightest sense of the proportion of customer issues that go /un/-addressed in this manner. But viewed through this lens... customer support is public politics. It's totally understandable that Apple would want to both maintain their image of aloofness from non-visionary matters, and deliberately avoid validating the existence of problems with their products in a public forum, which would also contradict a decades-long and painstakingly-crafted image. But it's also totally okay if the community or some segment of it makes a stink in the hopes of shifting the PR calculation.