South Koreans Say Steve Jobs Is Lying About Source of iPhone 4 Delays

Although seventeen more countries will be getting the iPhone 4 at the end of this week, South Korea’s not one of them… and it’s getting a lot of airplay in Seoul, with Steve Jobs being explicitly called a liar by the South Korean press.

The issue isn’t really the delay, so much, but a comment by Steve Jobs saying: “It’s going to take us a little longer to get government approval [for the iPhone 4 in South Korea].”

In actuality, government approval doesn’t seem to be the issue. In fact, the Korean government says that the iPhone 4 has yet to be submitted for approval to the proper channels, either by Apple or their local carrier partner, KT Corp.

The government statement has sparked some confrontational headlines. “Jobs lied, didn’t he?” one local newspaper wrote.

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The real issue is pretty clearly supply, “We don’t know why it’s been delayed, but one thing is that KT sold the phone very well and now wants to have a better profit from selling iPhone 4,” said Kim Dong-jun, an analyst at Eugene Securities in Seoul. “Negotiations over sufficient supply must also be going on.”

At the end of the day, I think this is just a case of Jobs misspeaking. I think it’s pretty obvious that Apple’s trying to get as many iPhone 4s to as many different countries as they can as quickly as possible: it’s money in their pockets, after all. Given the worldwide phenomenon that is the iPhone, that’s a Herculean task, and Apple should be credited with doing as good a job of it as they do.

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About the author

John Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in iPhone, News |

MacRat
It’s a North Korean plot.
Babbage
Oh please. The South Koreans are just upset and pissy that North Korea’s Dear Leader already got his hands on an iPhone 4 a couple months before them. heh
Fen Tiger
It’s supposedly available in the UK, but can I get one on the right carrier? No, so we’re no better off here really. Even my local Tesco (supermarket) has a waiting list.
Kim Jongill
Says Jobs: “It’s going to take us a little longer to get government approval [for the iPhone 4 in South Korea].”
Says Brownlee: “In actuality, government approval doesn’t seem to be the issue. In fact, the Korean government says that the iPhone 4 has yet to be submitted for approval to the proper channels, either by Apple or their local carrier partner, KT Corp.”
Jobs’ statement is not contradicted by the Korean government’s response. If approval is required and the device has not been submitted for the required approval, it stands to reason that it will take longer to get said approval. Nowhere does Jobs suggest that the delay in approval is the SK government’s fault, people have inferred that to have been his meaning.
In the meantime, I have also heard that the entire population of North Korea is already enjoying their free iPhone 4 units, unlocked and available on all national carriers.
LG DACOM
It will be great once it shows up here in Korea. Korean telecom service blows the pants off of AT&T for a much better price,
paulalex
I’ve been living in Korea for a number of years and unfortunately the English newspapers (Korea Times, Korea Herald) here do little more than shill for domestic companies like Samsung and LG. Anyone with even a little knowledge of the issue or common-sense will typically disregard the sensationalism that is constantly printed here.
Though many of the Android phones are decent, Koreans and ex-pats are loving their iPhones and can’t wait for its latest model (iPhone 4) to finally arrive.
Careful Reader
Oh, come on. Couldn’t Jobs’s statement mean that Apple simply hasn’t submitted the application to the South Korean government yet, for whatever reason?
If Jobs had felt inclined to gush details, the rest of the story could easily be something like “…because our guys lost the application forms” or some other thing on Apple’s side of the process that wouldn’t be at all inconsistent with the SK government’s version of things.
Jobs doesn’t tend to gush details he doesn’t feel obligated to go into detail on. In this case, bear in mind he was addressing the timeframe itself, NOT indulging in finger-pointing (or needlessly falling on his sword, either).
As it is, there’s really no reason other than general stupidity or cynicism, to jump to the sinister conclusion that his statement represents willful lying.
Did the fools in the South Korean press (and downstream) who jumped all over this story stop to think or ask any followup questions? What happened to critical analysis? Where are the news outlets who can report a story carefully and thoroughly any more?
Success certainly breeds parasites (pun intended), doesn’t it?