Updated October 2026. Trial dated to 2012; Jobs and Schiller lines sourced; unverified Quora line removed; Wall Street Journal chart paraphrased.
People still say Apple is a visionary company and that it does no market research. What the record supports is narrower. Apple did not hand big product decisions to a focus group, and the 2012 filings show it was surveying buyers at the same time.
The line people quote comes from Steve Jobs, speaking to Fortune in 2008: "We do no market research." He added that Apple did not hire consultants, apart from one firm hired to study Gateway's retail strategy before Apple opened its own stores. The interview is reproduced on all about Steve Jobs.
The 2012 Apple v Samsung trial, which this post originally called ongoing, put a different set of documents on the record. Greg Joswiak, then vice president of product marketing, filed a declaration asking the court to seal Apple's research. He wrote that Apple's surveys showed, country by country, what drove customers to buy an iPhone rather than an Android phone such as Samsung's, which features they used, who the buyers were, and how satisfied they were with different parts of the iPhone. VentureBeat reported the declaration on 3 August 2012. He said Apple ran the same kind of survey with iPad buyers, and that the iPhone and iPad results went only to a small group of executives.
The Wall Street Journal, on 26 July 2012, described one chart from those reports. Buyers in seven countries were asked why they chose an iPhone after looking at an Android phone. "Trust Apple brand" was the first or second reason in most of those countries. In the United States and in China, 54 per cent named it. In China, 67 per cent said they bought the phone because they liked the look and the design, the highest share in the group. The other countries on the chart were Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and South Korea. Easy transfer of music and other media across devices ranked almost last everywhere. In South Korea, 47 per cent cited a greater supply of the apps they wanted. The Journal's piece is Turns out Apple conducts market research after all.
In the same trial, Phil Schiller, then senior vice president of worldwide marketing, told the court that Apple did not use customer surveys, focus groups, "or typical things of that nature" when creating products. AppleInsider reported that testimony from 31 July 2012. Read next to Joswiak's declaration, the two statements fit. The buyer surveys were about who had purchased, why, and how satisfied they were. They were not a brief for the next product.
If you have been using the Jobs line as a reason not to collect customer feedback, the 2012 filings are the correction. Satisfaction, brand tracking and media research are ordinary tools. They do not replace a product decision.
Updated October 2026
- "Ongoing trial" now refers to the 2012 Apple v Samsung case. The Jobs line is tied to the Fortune 2008 interview. Schiller's product-creation remark is from AppleInsider, 31 July 2012.
- The chart figures (54 per cent, 67 per cent, 47 per cent, seven countries) are kept and linked to the Wall Street Journal, 26 July 2012. The long Journal extract is paraphrased.
- A Quora comment attributed to Fredrik Samanta was removed. The answer could not be checked. No claim is made about Apple's research programme in 2026.