Apple Friday “emphatically denied” an emailed statement attributed to CEO Steve Jobs and quickly spread by bloggers. In an exchange over frustration with iPhone 4 reception, the head of Apple supposedly replied: “It is just a phone. Not worth it.”
The exchange, originally published by the well-known Boy Genius Report blog, then spread by dozens of other sites, supposedly included this conversation between Jobs and a blogger identified as “Tom”:
Although that last line about the Apple handset being “just a phone” was soon corrected by BGR to reflect the reply came from “Tom,” the AppleInsider blog reported the person had previously attempted to sell the email exchange.
The incident reflects a growing trend by some sites to build news stories based on reputed e-mail comments by Jobs. In the past, Jobs supposedly has sent people email comments on a number of issues, including the expected death of Blu-Ray at the hands of iTunes, product reviews and more. Jobs’ apparent penchant for emails even prodded one fan to create “SentBySteve.com,” a site listing all of the CEO’s email exchanges with Apple customers.
[via AppleInsider, Fortune, and BGR]
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
