Meizu has revealed its futuristic port-free smartphone was nothing more than a marketing stunt.

The so-called “Zero” handset was announced just over a month ago before being made available to preorder through a failed crowdfunding campaign. But Meizu founder and CEO Jack Wong says the project “was just the marketing team messing about.”

If buttons, ports, and speaker grilles give you real anxiety when looking at your smartphone, Meizu has the perfect handset for you. It’s called the Zero, and it’s the first phone that completely ditches all of the above for a gorgeous ceramic unibody design.

But is it really worth it?

Over in China, Apple hasn’t had much luck in preventing local gadget knockoff artists from aping the iconic appearance of the iPhone in their own handsets. One of Apple’s few victories in this space, in fact, is their recent success in forcing notorious iPhone clone maker Meizu to shutter production.

All’s not cheery for Apple in China, though. Now another Chinese company called Herron Network Information Co. has come along, and they’re suing Apple as well as the Chinese Patent Bureau over Apple’s iPhone patents, which they attempt to characterize as not just overly broad, but “invalid.”

The most notorious iPhone knock-off at all is the Meizu M8, a cheeky doppelganger that looks virtually identical to the iPhone before you dive below the surface into the excremental ocean of its software: a custom-shelled version of Microsoft Windows CE 6. Meizu CEO Jack Wong has been cheekily shining Apple on about the Meizu M8’s more-than-subtle likeness to the iPhone for a while now, having laughed as recently as last month that the new iPod Touch looks just like their upcoming Meizu M9II Android smartphone.

Wong’s probably wishing he’d kept his mouth shut now. According to Wong, Meizu is now being forced by Cupertino’s lawyers to stop selling the M8… and it might be enough to put the company under.