It's certainly not an automated reply. I believe that his assistant reviews each email, replies using a standard email template and then passes the email onto the relevant team. It's a good setup. My blog gets several emails every day so I imagine a CEO of a large company gets thousands.
I know that Apple don't handle things their way. Every time you reply to one of their support tickets you get someone different. It is very frustrating. More than once I got stuck saying the same thing over and over to different people, with nothing getting done.
Around two years ago I was living in Colombia. All of a sudden my iPhone 4 stopped working and couldn't take any sim. It took weeks of support tickets and phone calls to many departments for them to eventually resolve it. Along the way I was accused of lying more than once. They kept saying the phone was locked and I had to pay to unlock it. Eventually they checked my account and verified that I bought the phone sim free from the Apple shop. They removed the block but there was no apology for accusing me of lying. Nor was their any compensation for me spending weeks without the use of a phone. I have had similar problems with them over different issues and the same kind of thing happened.
Apple promote the fact that they offer good customer service. My own experiences have been very different.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram