Wait in line like everyone else, you bastard

Isn't it just like Woz to show up and try to steal the spotlight from me on my big day? He's like the ex-girlfriend who shows up at the wedding dressed in a really hot sexy red dress, trying to take attention away from the bride. Fair enough. Apple geeks love Woz better than me. Always have. So of course he can't resist showing up on iPhone day to steal some of the love that was supposed to be aimed entirely at me. Plus, and this is really sad, Woz just thrives on the adulation and can't get enough of it. It's almost a sickness, the way he needs it.

First he went out telling everyone he invented the Mac. As if. Then he lifts my brand name and calls his book iWoz. Then he comes sniffing around looking for a free iPhone. Forget it, Captain Segway. Look. You did some nice work -- back in the seventies. To put it another way, the last time you did any real work, Styx was still selling out arenas. Bokay? Since then you've been coasting on my jet stream. Around here we're taking bets about how long it will be before Woz claims he invented the iPhone. I say less than a year.

Spot the MicroTards at the Seattle store

Check out these fine pix from Erik. He was at the Bellevue Square store in Seattle. Place was crawling with Microsofties, including Jim Allchin in a wig. If you recognize any others and want to send in names, please do.

UPDATE: Sorry, I messed up this link earlier. Wiped out after a night of iPartying.

Pix from Walnut Creek store

Much love to Dear Reader Brinke for these fine shots from Woodstock, er, the iPhone line at the Walnut Creek store yesterday.

Ay dios mio! I asked for a MacBook!

Look at this pobrecito in Uruguay who got stuck with this piece of shit One Laptop Per Child machine. Looks really happy about it doesn't he? (Photo comes from this story on Engadget.) Well, I can't blame you pal. It's a butt-ugly machine and the software doesn't really work. And even though you're living in deepest darkest Africa, you're clued in enough to know that you've been stuck with a Third World machine, and you've got a little too much pride for that. Right? Using one of these is like eating food from Unicef. Don't worry, young friend. We'll get you an iMac and even an iPhone. Just as soon as we can convince your country's government to spring for them.

Bearded lady? Man with lady hair?

Check out the circus freak who was first to score an iPhone in Tampa. For Christ's sake could we not get at least one normal-looking person in line for these things? Jesus. Much love to Engadget for scoring this.

Rudy: "If you don't buy an iPhone, then the terrorists have won."

Here he is out there at the Fifth Avenue store drafting on the free publicity, mugging it up with some loser from the iPhone line. Money quote: "I think it's great. I think it's great. It's great. I'm urging all New Yorkers, and in fact all Americans, to get out here and show some pride and let the world know that we're not scared. We're not running scared. We're not scared. We're out here, it's a beautiful day, we're standing in line to spend lots of money on a piece of consumer electronics. So that's how scared we are, right? See? We're not scared. We're right here, so if you think you're so bad-ass, here we are. Standing on the street, wearing Yankee firefighter helmets. Okay? We're right here." See the whole story here.

Bush: "Who else wants to see Ratatouille tonight?"

Money quote: "I heard it's better than Toy Story. Hard to believe. But I'd still like to see it. Who's in? Condi? What's that? Putin who? Oh, goddammit. You're right. I forgot." See here.

Brownback: "Discovery of iPhone is as profound as evolution, and I don't even believe in evolution."

Money quote: "I just wish Adam and Eve could be here now to see this." See here.

Cheney: "Fuck the iPhone. And fuck you, too."

Money quote: "The fucking thing runs on fucking EDGE? You've got to be fucking kidding me, you fuck." See here.

Edwards: "iPhone will eradicate poverty."

Money quote: "Low-cost housing will be built faster. Food prices will come down. Soup kitchens will take your order in less time and deliver delicious, piping hot meals exactly the way you want them. We'll have health insurance for everyone. The gap between the haves and have-nots will be erased. I am not just saying this. I truly believe this, deep in my soul. Honest." Sheesh. Hoo-boy. See here.

Hillary Clinton: "iPhone will transform health care."

Man oh man. They're all trying to cash in on the iPhone hype. Says Hillary: "The iPhone puts new power into the hands of physicians and could radically alter the way we deliver health care." See here.

Al Gore: "iPhone is as profound as polio vaccine, maybe more."

Money quote: "By combining three devices into a single device, iPhone will let us conserve energy and could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 30%." See here.

Johnny Skidmark found dead this morning

Wow, what a tragedy. We're all so upset. Cause of death: exposure, stupidity and extreme constipation. That's the cover story anyway. Moshe and his commando team insist an autopsy won't turn up a trace. Great work, guys.

29 June 2007: The day the world changed

Apple faithful,

Today we make history. Today we change the world. Today we put a dent in the universe. Today -- 29 June 2007 -- we release iPhone. It has taken years of work from all parts of Apple. First advertising, of course. Then feng shui consultants, and design and engineering and manufacturing. Countless emergent designs, countless meetings, countless all-nighters to make every part of the iPhone, from its custom-made integrated circuits to its sleek glass screen and metal case, absolutely perfect. To those of you who serve under me at Apple, I say this: Yes, I have berated you, and insulted you, and exasperated you. Yes, I've fired your friends for no reason, and made you work harder than you ever thought you could work. Yes, I've taken you away from your spouses, your children, your transgendered domestic partners. In some cases your devotion to me has cost you your marriages. You've sacrificed a great deal for this. But has it not been worth it? For the rest of your life, you'll be able to say that you were working at Apple when the iPhone was introduced. You were here on the day when the course of human history was changed forever. Plus, you'll get a free 4-gigabyte iPhone, a $500 value. Not bad, right?

Already, around the United States, thousands of Apple faithful are lining up outside our retail shrines, waiting for iPhone. Some will approach on their bare knees, like pilgrims approaching the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Peru. Just a few minutes ago we received a report that Apple faithful are also lining up outside retail shrines around the globe, even though those stores do not have iPhones and will not have them for months, maybe years. The response is, in a word, stunning. We are saving the satellite photos showing the clusters and will use them as part of our promotional material. Apple employees, view these photos and see what you have done, and then go home and tell your children -- those smallish people who live in your house, the ones you haven't seen in a couple of years -- tell them, You see those people suffering outdoors, enduring the heat and rain and monsoons just so they can get a cell phone? I did this. This was my work.

To those Apple customers who are already congregating in thousands outside our retail shrines, I say: Thank you, much love, and namaste. You have endured taunts and jeers and the incessant attention of a media starved for material in the midst of a slow summer news cycle; you've been spat upon, abused, attacked by police with firehoses and nightsticks and guard dogs; you've peed into bottles and lived on junk food. But you stuck to your principles. You remained true to your beliefs, the core one being that yes, you are special, and you deserve to be among the first in the world to obtain a device that combines telephony, Web browsing and music playing. Yes, we'll still be selling these devices a week from now, and the week after that. But you want yours now. You're making a statement. The world is hearing you.

Let's be honest about why this is happening. This is not a fad. This is not some phony hyped-up astroturfing Microsoft campaign. This is a genuine outpouring of love and enthusiasm and excitement from people whose souls have been stirred by the wonder of technology and the ability to communicate with other human beings in ways that have never before been possible. That's what this is about. It's about communicating. It's about connecting. It's about bringing the world together in common cause. It's about saying, Look, I realize there's something bad happening in Darfur, and there's some kind of AIDS epidemic in Africa, and there's some crazies who want to blow us all up, and there's a war in Iraq where thousands of people are dying for no reason -- and yes, those things are important, and someday we may take to the streets to say something about them, if we can think of anything to say about them, but for now we Americans take to the streets for this cause. Right here, right now, we take a stand. This is our moment. From pole to pole, from north to south, from east to west, let the message go out. We are Americans, and we have values. Hear us, world. Hear us and say, Wow.

The iPhone stands for something very simple -- freedom. Apple faithful, you march today in the tradition of the marchers at Selma, in the tradition of Gandhi at the Salt March to Dandi. You have made your point. There are some things, you said, that are worth suffering for. I am proud to have given meaning to your life. I am proud to have invented iPhone and designed iPhone and brought iPhone to the world. I feel, in a way, humbled by your adoration. But in another way not humbled. Anyway. My whole life has built up to this moment. I believe that this is what I was put on the earth to achieve. I thank you all for sharing this historic day with me.

Namaste. Much love. Peace out.

Dear Leader

Freetards: "No iPhones for us, thanks."

A reader sends in this email which Free Software Foundation director Peter Brown (pictured right) sent out to a mailing list today. There seems to be a hint here that the freetards think the iPhone infringes on their copyrights and that maybe they'll try to bring some legal action. God, I'm shaking. Here are some highlights:

From: Peter Brown
Date: Jun 28, 2007 3:28 PM
Subject: iPhone restricts users, GPLv3 frees them
To: info-fsf@gnu.org, info-member@gnu.org, info-press@gnu.org

iPhone restricts users, GPLv3 frees them

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Thursday, June 28, 2007 -- On Friday, June 29, not everyone in the continental U.S. will be waiting in line to purchase a $500 iPhone. In fact, hundreds of thousands of digital aficionados around the globe won't be standing in line at all, for June 29 marks the release of version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL). .. .

The author of the the GPL is Professor Richard M. Stallman, president and founder of the Free Software Foundation, and creator of the GNU Project. ...

The iPhone is leaving people questioning: Does it contain GPLed software? What impact will the GPLv3 have on the long-term prospects for devices like the iPhone that are built to keep their owners frustrated?

Peter Brown, executive director of the FSF said, "Tomorrow, Steve Jobs and Apple release a product crippled with proprietary software and digital restrictions: crippled, because a device that isn't under the control of its owner works against the interests of its owner. We know that Apple has built its operating system, OS X, and its web browser Safari, using GPL-covered work -- it will be interesting to see to what extent the iPhone uses GPLed software."

The GNU GPL version 3 will be released at 12:00pm (EDT) -- six hours before the release of the iPhone -- bringing to a close eighteen months of public outreach and comment, in revision of the world's most popular free software license.

Media Contacts
Joshua Gay
Campaigns Manager
Free Software Foundation
617-542-5942 jgay@fsf.org

A couple of questions: Since when did Stallman become "Professor"? Isn't "homeless person" a better title? And would you please stop going around spreading this FUD about us using your code and dropping veiled hints about us possibly violating your license? Take us to court or shut the fuck up.

Playboy: At last something else to do with your free hand

Yep, even Hef is jumping on board the iPhone crazy train. Actually, he's not jumping. He's being helped aboard. Same thing. Kind of.

Woman trades child for spot at front of iPhone line

Money quote: "I can adopt another one." This just happened at the Palo Alto store. Folks, this is getting out of hand.

Nationwide iPhone Line Gallery

The name says it all. See here.

Okay, let's have a caption contest

People are already writing them anyway. So let's do this thing.

Couple favors to ask on behalf of the interns: Put the word "caption" in the subject line of your email, and put your name in the photo file. jpg or png preferred. No pdf. Bokay?

"I don't want the iPhone, just the attention."

Talk about pathetic. Here's Robert "Skidmark Junior" Scoble, in line for an iPhone in Palo Alto. Much love to AP photog Paul Sakuma.

From our good friends at iPhone Matters

Check out their site here. And you might want to do it soon because we're probably going to shut them down for using the word "iPhone" in their name. Sorry guys. But I do like the picture.

Freetard iPhone clone delayed

See the sad news here. I know, it's shocking. I mean, the whole community development process usually works so much faster and more efficiently than proprietary models. Why wouldn't it? You've got thousands of the world's best amateurs working together and all they have to do is copy what other people have already done. Look at Linux, right? Storming the desktop, only 16 years after its inception. Well, for now I guess you'll have to spend $500 for an iPhone that actually works. And then in a year or two you'll be able to spend $400 for a freetard clone that kinda sorta not really works. And finally Richard Stallman will be able to make phone calls.

iPhone doomed, says Prat

See here. A guy named David Prat [shurely not, Ed] says the iPhone "is going to be a bigger marketing flop than Ishtar and Waterworld (dating myself again, aren't I) combined," and will "crash in flames the way Apple’s late and unlamented Newton did." This guy is an expert because he's -- gasp -- written a book about software, called Why Software Sucks. He's also created the "It Just Works Movement."

Feel free to send this jackoff hate mail. Or maybe not. See, when you click on his button that says, "Click here to contact the author," you get an error message. So much for "It Just Works." I'm not kidding. Click on the link above, go to his "Suckbusters" page and try it. Nice job, code monkey.

But wait. It gets better. Katie Cotton just did some digging and found out that Mr. Software Expert runs a company called Rolling Thunder Computing, which specializes in ... well, click on the link and see. Hint: You'll be shocked -- shocked! -- to find out who pays this frigtard's salary.

Michael Moore is a fat stupid lying media whore

First he cooked up this stupid fake story about how the government was threatening to put him in jail for going to Cuba. Then he held the press conference to announce that he'd stored his movie in a safe house in Canada because he was afraid the fascists would come take his film away from him. (And this was news why?) Now this fat shameless shill is trying to draft on our hype by ginning up another fake controversy, saying here that Apple and AT&T are trying to distract attention from his dumbass movie which has the bad luck to be opening tomorrow.

Okay, fair enough, this last bit is made up. The site hosting that story is a satire site. But it's a really well-done fake. And it gives me the opportunity to act outraged and to say that Michael Moore is a big fat stupid lying media whore. Man, that feels good.

iPhone hype roundup

Some government publication says federal employees won't get iPhones anytime soon. Boo friggin hoo. See here. Losers waiting on line in New York have started their own blog to chronicle their loserhood. See here. The soon-to-be-defunct Business 2.0 reports that the iPhone marketing campaign will be studied in business schools for years to come. See here. TechNewsWorld [this can't be real, Ed] prints a rehash of all of Apple's past flops, like the Newton and the Cube. See here. And the ever-reliable SFGate has a story about idiots who are being paid to wait in line. See here. Some blogger says eBooks are a perfect fit for the iPhone and that we could kill Sony in that market. See here. Wired (our old pals) report that the iPhone has thrown the wireless industry into chaos and confusion and forced them to admit that they don't have a clue about what customers want. See here.

Hate mail

This just came in via email from a guy named Stits. I'm just so upset. Negativity really upsets me. But I have to share it with you so you can see the kind of abuse that a celebrity CEO must endure, even while trying to walk the razor's edge and create beautiful objects that restore a sense of childlike wonder to the world.

Hi Steve, long time fan of you and Apple but I'm a little ticked. I think this whole iPhone fucktastic media push has forced you to neglect us loyal professionals and academics who love out Macs. Frankly ordering a laptop and have to wait a whole god dammed month for it to ship is proof of it. Never hear people complaining about having to wait for a dell over a hard drive upgrade do you?

Anyway, that's my little bit of constructive criticism. Hope it helps. Also I should mention in closing that I own a few shares of stock so I was torn about even writing this letter. I still think you're the best man to run apple I just with you would remember that the universe isn't revolving around "i" products. It's still all about the computers. In reality all this stuff is an accessory.

Hope this helps, Stits.

You hope this helps? How on earth does this help? You know what would help? What would help would be if you would go buy a Dell and leave me alone.

If I had a gun I would shoot this guy myself

If you had any doubt that Johnny Skidmark was a Microsoft operative, that should now be well put away.

Much love, BusinessWeek

Peter Burrows of BusinessWeek does a deep dive on Apple culture and explains why we're so great. Money quote: "Once known for defining the digital future but never fully capitalizing on it, Apple has been transformed into tech's most influential hit-maker." Which is exactly the way we wrote it when we sent the piece over to BusinessWeek last month. Nice work, guys. You're our new favorite outlet, now that Fortune has decided to become our enemy.

New logo for GigaOm? Or TechCrunch?

Much love to our friend Jean-Paul Buquet, cartoonist for Macsimum News, for this cartoon. By way of explanation: It's recently been discovered that certain bloggers have been taking money from Microsoft and then using Microsoft's "people ready" slogan in their writing. "Spokesblogging," it's called. [Shurely "streetwalking"?! Ed] See examples here. The bloggers involved were part of the Federated Media network. Federated did the deal with Microsoft and then solicited "spokesblogger" comments -- say something nice about "people ready" and you get some ads on your blog.

Basically this is akin to a movie studio saying to the New York Times, We'll buy ads for our new movie in your paper -- but only if you can get your movie reviewer to write something nice about our movie, so we can put that nice quote in the ad that we run in your paper. Geddit? (In the TV biz it's called "the Shalit maneuver," or "pulling a shalit.")

Bloggers involved include Om Malik and Michael Arrington. Arrington is huffing and puffing that there's nothing wrong with bloggers doing what he did. He ends up sounding like a gal who's trying to convince you that she's not a "prostitute," she's an "escort."

What makes this delicious is that these "spokesbloggers" are the same sanctimonious twats who are constantly spouting bullshit about the glories of "citizen journalism" and patting themselves on the back and congratulating themselves for being so much more ethical and independent than the dreaded "Mainstream Media." Riiiiight. That anyway was their story a few years ago. Now that they're all struggling to make money they're bent over their desks with their pants down, and it turns out they're even easier to buy off than their Old Media counterparts.

And highly ethical Microsoft -- of course, who else? -- is first in line to take advantage of the situation. First they gave out free Vista laptops to bloggers. Remember that? Now they're turning bloggers into Vista spokespuppets, paying them to parrot back Microsoft's vapid catchphrases. For years Microsoft has faced a traditional press corps that is almost uniformly hostile to Microsoft and can't be bought off. But bloggers? They practically go around with "For Sale" signs on their foreheads. The blogosphere turns out to be a wet dream for Microsoft.

Few final notes:

1. I'm proud to say that here at Apple we don't pay off bloggers and hacks; we go to the trouble of hypnotizing them. It's a lot more work, but we think it's worth it.

2. Bit of advice to Microsoft: If you've got to pay spokesparrots to spout your slogan, you probably need a better slogan.

3. FWIW, Fake Steve did not participate in the spokesblogger scam.

Rethinking my position on Internet TV

A while back I wrote a piece about how Internet video content sucked compared to "real" TV. But after seeing this cheesy bit where Craig McPishflaps and Fonzie trade hokey Leno-style "impromptu banter" about the iPhone, I'm rethinking my position. TV networks, listen to me -- if you get destroyed by the Internet, it will be your own damn fault. Yes, most stuff on the Internet is lame (cough Eisner cough Prom Queen cough) but we're fast approaching a situation where everything edgy, daring, risky, and funny is on the Internet and "real" TV becomes a version of the old "Lawrence Welk" show, a place where washed-up old comedians trade vanilla-bean scripted chat and unfunny pablum jokes and nobody ever dares say anything that might offend anyone.

Trust me, I own one of these networks. I talk to the executives. They're clueless pussies who will never dare to take any risks because at the end of the day what they care most about is keeping their jobs and perks and fancy offices. Meanwhile the nothing-to-lose-and-no-FCC-rules Internet stuff is coming at them at warp speed. Worse yet, the networks have destroyed their own news operations, which was really the only part of their business where they were adding value. And this, by the way, is now the huge gaping opportunity on the Internet. Forget "Ask a Ninja" or "Naked News" or girls in bikinis on trampolines. Someone with money and brains is going to do an Internet version of what Ted Turner did with CNN in the early days of cable. Real content. High quality, good reporters, cheap cameras out in the field. Streaming news and on-demand, so you could go back and watch pieces over and over again, or email them to friends.

Just imagine what you could do in Iraq with twenty ballsy reporters armed with cheap digital cameras and no network brass to censor them. Imagine how you could cover the 2008 elections. Imagine the size of the worldwide audience. Imagine how stunned people would be if, for once, the people doing the news could actually tell you the truth. Imagine if the reporters were smart, funny and wise-ass, instead of Ken Doll robots with strings in the back of their heads. Imagine if you didn't have to abide by the stupid rules about equal time and fair play. Imagine if you got a handful of sales guys with TV experience (nobody over 40) to bring in the advertising. It'll happen. Wait and see.

There. I said it. Now I'm going to go watch some Veronica Belmont.

Fair enough, so we're doing a deal with Microsoft

We were going to keep it quiet for a while more but since the MicroTards decided to leak it to Mary Jo Creepy, their official mouthpiece, I guess we might as well come clean. Okay. We need to license Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync protocol so we can make the iPhone work with Exchange servers. I personally think Exchange blows, but it's a big standard in corporations and Phil Schiller is peeing his pants with fear saying we can't afford to get pegged as non-corporate-friendly on the iPhone. So whatever. We license some software from Microsoft. God I just gagged when I wrote that. No doubt we'll not only have to license the software from them but then we'll have to fix it for them so it will work with the Jesus machine. And we'll get blamed every time something goes wrong even though it's Microsoft's fault. Whatever. It's the price we pay.

Best line in the Foley piece is the "refuse to comment" item from a company spokeswoman. Please. Waggener Edstrom is the one spreading the word on this deal. It's Microsoft's way of trying to draft on our momentum. I'm just wondering whether Frank Shaw will post anything on his Glass House blog about it. Yeah, maybe not. So much for radical transparency.

First shots of iPhone in the wild

To see an iPhone that somehow got out of a reviewer's hands and into the hands of a regular citizen, see here. Much love to Shawn at Your Mac Life for the tip. Tonight's radio show will feature an interview with David Pogue of the New York Times. For more info go here.

Gates just called, dropping hints

Supposedly he called to follow up on something that he claims I'd asked him about when we were backstage at the D show. Then he starts talking about the iPhone and how crazy it is and how am I holding up and so forth. Then he says, "Well, ya know, I'm kind of anxious to get hold of one myself," and I know what he's hinting at, he wants me to send one up to him because he's the Great Bill Gates, and I guess I should be a mensch and just give him a freebie but you know what? No way. Not after all that smacktalk from Ballmer.

"They go on sale Friday," I said. "So you won't have to wait too much longer. Send your assistant out to get in line. Or better yet, ask Jim Allchin to get one for you while he's getting his own. And please do let me know what you think. You know how much we value your input on stuff like this."

We've found the real Prince Toto Bouba

Fantastic work by my assistant Ja'Red and his assistant Mayzie. They've managed to track down the real Prince Toto Bouba (above). They've traded email with him and one of his assistants, and we just set up a conference call so I could talk to them myself. Turns out he's the heir to the throne in Angola, and he's also a huge Apple fanboy. Says he's got a bunch of Macs and iPods and he's dying to get his hands on an iPhone. He also wants to get involved in setting up an Apple retail store in Angola. Much love, Prince Toto Bouba, friend of Apple. Your shiny iPhone will be heading your way shortly.

Pretenders to the iPhone throne

Maybe it's my own fault for launching that search for Prince Toto Bouba. Naturally now we're getting inundated with email from people claiming to be the prince. The guy in sunglasses is the prince we partied with at Cannes, but I've been told he's the prince of some other country, not Angola. Other guy calls himself "Prince Bourbon," which is close to "Bouba," but come on. There's no such country. Nice try, fakers. But you're not getting an iPhone.

Johnny Skidmark threatens to quit line; cites lack of Flash and Java support, lack of real SDK

Money quote: "Honestly right now I just feel betrayed. No Flash? No Java? And they call this the real Internet? I'm very, very disappointed. And the whole SDK situation has me bumming big-time. I can't see waiting another three days. Certainly I won't be using this phone myself. I guess maybe it would be worth it to stay and get the first one. Call it a collector's item. Sell it on Ebay. I don't know. Right now I'm just up in the air."

NYFD responding to report of "bad odor" on Fifth Avenue near Central Park

Nothing to worry about, folks. It's just Johnny Skidmark. Nothing to see here. Move along. Okay? Move along.

Does anyone in Eastern Europe know how to reach Prince Toto Bouba?

Naturally I'm getting bombarded with email requests from people who know me (and people who don't) asking for an iPhone. Everyone in Hollywood has had their assistants calling up to make inquiries. Paris Hilton's people offered to have her carry one when she left jail, and flash it so that the paparazzi could see it. (We declined, politely.) Meanwhile I just got this letter from Prince Toto Bouba of Angola. He's a little vague, in the way royalty people usually are. They'll never come straight out and ask you for something. (You should see the letters from Wills and Harry. The spelling mistakes; the loopy, childish handwriting -- God they remind me of their mother.) Anyway, I'm pretty sure Toto Bouba is the dude I met at Cannes a few months ago when I was partying with Bono and Graydon Carter. He seems to want an iPhone and I'll send him one if I can get his address. I guess he just assumes that everyone knows how to send mail to a prince. Or maybe it's bad form for royalty to put their return address in a letter or something. Ja'Red is trying to find it but he also says he's never heard of Toto Bouba and that as far as he knows Angola stopped having royalty after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or maybe it was the Hapsburgs, he's not sure. If any of you know how to reach Prince Toto Bouba, let me know. Or Toto, if you're reading this, send in your address. Here's the letter:

Sir,

My name Prince Toto Bouba I am from Luanda Norte in the Central district of Angola. I am contacting you for partnership in a very confidential financial transaction that involves the transfer and receivership of some deposit.

This deposit came from private mining of diamond in our region which represent the major deposit of diamonds in my country. Coupled with the rebels activities which are sponsored by illegitimate sales of diamonds to foreign companies.

Presently the Government forces are occupying our regions which has forced us the locals out of the country in search of lucrative business outside our shores for investment purposes. Your immediate response will be appreciated as time is of essence. Details will be given to you when you respond. Please include your direct phone number.

Sincerely,

Toto Bouba

Great way to have fun in any PC dealer's showroom

Some guy at InformationWeek describes a simple single keystroke trick that will send any Vista machine into a spastic death dance and then crash altogether. All you do is hold down the Windows key and the letter E for 10 seconds. I'm not suggesting that you walk into Best Buy or Circuit City and do this to every Vista machine on display, and then leave a little picture of an iMac or MacBook next to each blinking Vistard machine. I'm really not. I'd also love it if you could bring a little camera and make a movie of the blinking moron boxes dying en masse. Do this and I guarantee you top placement here on the blog, plus a spot in the FSJ Hall of Fame. See instructions here. Much love, InformationGeek. Free fake iMac is in the mail. Meanwhile another dude at InformationWeek gripes that we're focusing too much on the iPhone to the detriment of the iMac, and begs us to show some love to the Mac faithful. We're working on it. Trust me.

New York Post says don't buy an iPhone

Which is about the best press we could have hoped for. Thanks, fascists. Your demographic is exactly the one we'd like to keep away from our products. Any chance you could hand-deliver a copy of your wretched newspaper to Johnny Skidmark? Much love. For the full review, see here.

First iPhone mugging reported

See here. We're working with authorities in Japan to apprehend the culprit. We're going to nip this iPhone-related violence in the bud. Remember, folks. Let's keep things positive.

Johnny Skidmark still in line despite Mossberg's review

Check out this very sad video of the iPhone loser squad on Fifth Avenue and vote for which guy is the most pathetic.

Holy crap. Valleywag is on fire.

First they broke the story about Microsoft pumping money into high-integrity "spokesbloggers" like Om Malik. Now they've nailed a scoop about Fortune magazine going after us. See here. They found out somehow that Fortune magazine has ordered up a hit job on me from Peter Elkind, the guy who did the Enron stuff for them. They've found out also that we're blackballing Fortune and not letting them have an early review unit of the iPhone. They even describe me as "still an inveterate control freak" and basically describe me as a huge son of a bitch who takes out personal vendettas against journalists who cross me. You know what? It's all true. You don't mess with Steve. Forget what you've heard about me getting soft now that I'm in my fifties. I haven't ripened and mellowed. I haven't matured. You frig with El Jobso and I will rip your friggin lungs out. That's a promise.

Here's something Valleywag doesn't know, because even Fortune doesn't know it. We've seen a draft of the Elkind story. Not going to tell you how, but we have. Let's just say we still have some friends on the staff at Fortune, and leave it at that. And we're ready to knock down the Elkind story point by point. It's an ugly story, and we're going to have to be even uglier to refute it, but we're going to do what we have to do. Just warning you, Peter.

To Nick Denton of Valleywag fame: Well done. Or molodets, as we say in Krasnodar. Namaste. I honor the place where you and I become one.

Goatberg gushes

Good thing we got to him with the hypnosis "briefing." Let me tell you, it was close. To see his review, go here. But if you'd rather not wade through all of it, I'll provide an executive summary here, in bullet format. According to Walt, the iPhone:

* adds multiple steps to common functions that are easy to perform on a regular phone.
* runs on EDGE, which is pokey, and the can't be upgraded to run on faster networks.
* does well on Wi-Fi, but this "doesn't fully make up for the lack of a fast cellular data capability."
* won't work with a lot of iPod accessories.
* has no overall search.
* has no quick way to move up and down on pages.
* has no way to cut, copy or paste text.
* can read Excel, Word and PDF documents, but can't edit or save them.
* can make phone calls but in many ways it's a pain in the ass, even more so than with other smart phones.
* boasts voice quality that's "good but not great."
* has no way to get your contact list from your old phone.
* can't turn contact groups into email distribution lists.
* has some third-party apps, "but the few we tried weren't impressive."
* has no instant messaging.
* can't record video with its camera, and has 2-megapixel resolution.
* has no support for Flash, so can't view stuff on some Web sites.
* can't turn your iPod songs into ringtones.
* has no games.
* can't access iTunes Music Store directly.
* costs twice as much as its competitors.
* isn't for the "average person" who just wants a cheap phone for making calls and texting.
* probably isn't for corporate types either.

Conclusion? "A beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer."

Thanks Walt. Much love.

Can an iPhone help you get laid? Maybe.

At least the guy who created this T-shirt seems to think so. And no, it's not one of ours. Dammit.

Ryan Block of Engadget says our prices are okay

See his analysis here. Money quote: "You're going to pay more for the device itself, but the iPhone plans are totally fair, based on AT&T's current pricing scheme." Much love, Ryan. You'll be near the top on the B list for getting a review unit. Veronica is on the A list but only if she shows up in person to pick it up.

Nokia board member disses the iPhone

Money quote: “I think it will be big in the U.S., but not anywhere else. In Europe and Asia there are all those phenomenal phones out there that make the iPhone look pedestrian.” Guy's name is Daniel Hesse. See the whole story here.

More crazies sending me petitions

See here. It's a petition that they're going to send me demanding that we sell an unlocked iPhone. I'm pretty sure you can sign any old name. So if you're sitting at work and you're bored, have at it.

News flash: This bonehead is a Microsoft plant

No guff. Our intelligence team did some digging around, snooping through phone records and email accounts, and they managed to find out the truth. It was obvious to us that this guy couldn't be buying an iPhone for himself. At first we thought maybe some rich dude had hired him to wait on line. But then we read the Vwag scoop about these cases where Microsoft has been secretly funneling money into "spokesbloggers" like Om Malik (nice scoop, by the way) and we realized what they were doing. What better way to pee on the iPhone than to plant some stupid frigtard right at the front of the line so he gets interviewed and photographed and publicized everywhere? What better way to get back at us for the "I'm a Mac" ads? I can almost hear Beastmaster Bill sniggering in his office. Apparently this was dreamed up by the folks at Waggener Edstrom and carried out in such a way that there's no paper trail. Well played, you evil bastards. Hope you're paying this guy a fortune. No doubt he'll get on the Today show and he'll try to turn the spot into a free ad for Windows Mobile -- maybe he'll say something about how you can get all the same features in a Windows Mobile phone that only costs a hundred bucks. Whatever. It's not going to derail the iPhone, so knock yourselves out.

Hype roundup

SFGate has what I think must be the best headline so far: "Can iPhone change the way we live?" See here. Lame-ass Scoble tries to cash in on the hype by running some badly made video comparing the iPhone to some non-iPhone from Nokia. Cult of Mac has an item about a now former Apple employee showing off his iPhone at a party. The New York Post takes a classy approach, talking about gobs of come [shurely not?! Ed] as they relate to the iPhone. Engadget does a pointless retrospective about fake iPhones. Gizmodo has a video interview with the surly freak who's first in line at Fifth Avenue. Someone has posted a photo of the slightly less ugly looking weirdos who are lining up at the Soho store in New York. Go here for one of many stories about the AT&T rate plans, and no bitching you cheap bastards. AppleInsider had a nice piece yesterday about the SWAT teams we had on duty to take delivery of the iPhones when they arrived over the weekend; luckily Katie Cotton got to them before they ran the story and they left out the part about us shooting those two guys on the docks in Los Angeles. Finally some cookbook freak says herethat the iPhone is the greatest thing for cooks since, well, you know.

Vogelstein: "Four and a half inches of pure pleasure right in the palm of my hand."

From what we hear, he's also working on a story about the iPhone.

Call this frigtard and tell him the bad news

Meet one Greg Packer. He's first in line at the store on Fifth Avenue in New York and believes that, because of this, he will be first to buy an iPhone. Not so fast, loser. As I've pointed out before, we're setting standards this time about who can buy iPhones, based on status, personal appearance, income, and general level of coolness. How far down the list are you? Put it this way. You will not be getting an iPhone until everyone else in the world who wants one has one. Like, Osama Bin Laden will be using Google maps to find a seafood restaurant in Kandahar before you see yours.

In case you think I'm making this guy up, see his pathetic blog, which includes his email address and phone number which are:

Email: grego11743@hotmail.com

Mobile phone: 631.291.2603.

Now I'm not saying you should call this guy and harass him for hurting our image and tell him he's a moron; I'm not saying you should call him so often that his cell phone battery dies; I'm not saying you should prank call him and tell him your friend is in line and doesn't have a phone and you need to get an urgent message to him right away and could he give a shout down the line to Mike Hunt; and then call back and ask for Dick Hertz and Hugh Jerection and Al Kaholic. I'm not saying you should do this. I'm really not. Bokay? I mean just because he's enough of a frigtard to put his phone number up on the Web doesn't mean it's cool to mess with him. But if you do cal him, make sure you record it and send me a copy.

Line forming in New York; Dvorak poops in pants

A blog called Electronista says a line is forming at the Fifth Avenue store. Two guys have staked out a claim. Yes, it's nuts. And yes, I love it. Dvorak meanwhile continues in his grumpy way, saying he's sick of the hype and can't wait for it to be over already and he's going out for Depends and Salem Lights and does anyone else need anything? Money quote: "Exactly what new meditation sequence Steve Jobs learned recently that could create such a flurry of fawning interest is beyond me. He should become a guru and teach it to the likes of Chrysler Corp. executives. Seriously, this whole thing is creepy in some mystical way." Dvorak, you are a jealous old queen.

Meanwhile some dude at Harvard compares me to God, saying, "God himself couldnot design a device that could live up to all the hype that the iPhone has gotten."

No, I will not join Facebook and be your "friend"

What the hell is up with the Facebook craze? This is exactly the kind of crap I hated when I was briefly in college and I hate it even more now. Every time I check my email I've got a bunch of requests from dickhead VCs telling me they've added me as a friend. You know what? If you were really my friend you wouldn't be bugging me with bullshit like this. And if you really had anything worthwhile to do with your time you wouldn't be fucking around on Facebook and Twitter. Jesus Christ. Does anyone do any actual work out here? Oh that's right. I forgot. You're a venture capitalist. This is what you do for work.

Get paid to wait in line for an iPhone

Cult of Mac blog reports that people are so nuts for the iPhone that they are placing ads on Craigslist offering to hire other frigtards to stand in line for them. More amazing is that not all of these ads are being placed by Apple. Honest. We started it, but now it's got a life of its own.

Goatberg is threatening to break the embargo

I guess because I chewed him out for violating the NDA and showing off his friggin iPhone at some conference. Of course that's not what he says when he explains why he wants to run his review earlier than everyone else. What he says is that he's Walt friggin Mossberg, the most important technology journalist on the planet, and nobody tells him what to do. Not even El Jobso. Walt, you see, has this teeny tiny ego problem. You know what I told him? I said, Walt, you do what you like, but just remember, even the world's greatest technology journalist can't do his job unless the technology companies send him their stuff to review. So if you want to burn us on this one, go ahead. We'll pretend to be all upset and we'll create a big stink and milk the whole "scandal" for loads of publicity too -- and then we'll shut you down. In the immortal words of Robert DeNiro: Do you feel lucky punk? Then go ahead, make my day.

This actually is kind of how I feel

This comes from the Washington Post. For the original link go here. Much love to reader Alan who sent this in.

Merry Christmas, Australia

And New Zealand too. I just was talking to Jon Ive and one of his top guys, Mick Gale, who happens to be an Aussie and they were telling me how right now it's winter in Australia and how June 25 is Christmas down there. I guess I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't know this but what can I say, I'm a typical xenophobic culturally ignorant American. Or "Yank" as Mike and his family say. We just did an iChat with Mike's family who were back from midnight mass and all wearing shiny paper crowns and blowing whistles and singing "Silent Night." Very cool. G'day, Australia! And to you Kiwis too. Uncle Steve will be sending you all a very nice shiny present very soon. That's right. It's an iPhone. Carrier arrangements are being worked out and we should have announcements soon. Much love. Namaste. Joyeux Noel. Peace on earth. And peace out.

A message to global warming skeptics

So I'm getting loads of mail in response to my post about Al Gore. People are telling me I've got the facts all wrong: the world temperature hasn't gone up 1.5 degrees Celsius in six months, it's .05 degrees Fahrenheit in sixty years; it's not true that a piece of ice the size of Greenland broke off from Iceland, and it couldn't possibly be true, since Greenland is roughly 100 times the size of Iceland. So fair enough. Maybe it was a piece of ice the size of Iceland that broke off from Greenland. Whatever. Listen. You can quibble all you want over tiny mistakes. You can keep calling for more studies, and you can sit around with your thumbs up your butts while the planet keeps getting hotter. Or you can put aside the details and keep your eyes on the big picture. Don't you see what the skeptics are doing? The tiny details are what the oil companies and Republicans want people to focus on. They'll just keep throwing these nitpicky things at us, trying to wear us out. Like Al told everyone this weekend at Barbra's house, these guys are just going to keep looking for tiny mistakes and then trying to extrapolate from those tiny mistakes that the whole theory is wrong. But it's not wrong. It's right. Everyone with half a brain knows that it's right. Anyway. To those of you who wrote in, I appreciate your criticism. But you're wrong and Al is right.

Business 0.0

Just heard this from Katie Cotton. Apparently there is a tech magazine called Business 2.0 that covers Silicon Valley and it's about to go under. Ad pages and revenues are in serious decline and the editor, Josh Quittner [shurely "Quitter"?!] is rushing around cap in hand begging money from VCs or looking to flog the thing off to some bigger fool. Funny thing is that nobody in the Valley hack community is writing about it. Sure they'll flood their pages with rumor and innuendo and speculation when El Jobso has a hassle with the S.E.C. They'll revel in the troubles of any company out here. But when one of their own is going under, um, well, I guess that's different. Or maybe it strikes too close to the bone for all of them, because the truth is none of these rags is doing very well these days. Most notable silence comes from one recently departed Biz 2.0 hack who's now supposedly running a snarky gossip site called Valleywag that's filled with inside dirt on Valley figures. Question: Will Owen Bigglesworth dare to bite the hand that used to feed him?

iPhone hype roundup

One analyst describes the hysteria this way: "This is the most anticipated phone since Alexander Graham Bell did his." See here. Not that it matters but I think this is the dope who went to work for Microsoft a few months ago and then quit after a week. Namaste to Brinke for the link.

Cringely says here that the iPhone is part of some kind of secret scheme to help Google. Or something. Honestly I can never figure out what Cringely is trying to say and I suspect it's because he doesn't know either. Much love to Alastair for the tip.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog breaks a big investigative piece by discovering that AT&T stores are running their iPhone video ads on a Dell. God forbid. See here. Thanks, Reid.

Some frigtard from Advertising Age writes, "Why the iPhone will Fail." See here. Tip from Peter.

A guy I've never heard of explains why people are jealous of me here.

Roughly Drafted, a loyal friend to Apple in good times and in bad, slashes iPhone critics and declares the product a sure winner. Yes, we pay this guy. Okay? Whatever. He's right anyway. Much love to faddah for the tip.

You know what would be really cool?

What would be really cool is if, on Friday, just as the iPhone is about to go on sale, we put out this announcement that says, Oh yeah, one more thing, we forgot to mention that, um, today we're also rolling out our new completely redesigned Macs, with the brushed aluminum which makes them a perfect complement to the iPhone and yeah they've got specs and price points that blow away everything the market. Yeah. That would be awesomely cool. Not saying its' going to happen. Because despite what you've heard, I'm not the one who makes all the decisions around here. But I have suggested to various people that in the opinion of El Jobso this would be awesomely cool. We'll see.

We must get Al Gore to run for president

I've held off saying much about this in public. But I can't wait any longer. I can't stay silent. I won't be able to live with myself if I do. Can't you feel it? The world is getting warmer. A lot warmer. The warming trend is accelerating. The crisis has become urgent. Last night I flew down to L.A. for a meeting at Barbra Streisand's house to discuss global warming. It was a big crowd. People flew in from all around the world. Sting and Trudie, Bono, George Soros, John Doerr (who choked up and blubbered again as he did on stage recently), loads of VCs from the Valley, Andy Grove, T.J. Rodgers, Sergey and Larry (who took separate planes because I guess they're not on good terms these days) and Squirrel Boy who also flew in by himself on his own 767, plus the usual line-up of studio executives and A-list Hollywood actors, like Brad and Angelina and Leo, and Larry David's weirdo ex-wife, who was holding hands with Sheryl Crow, though I'm not sure if they've hooked up or what. Al was there as the featured speaker. I'm telling you, he's electric. He's fantastic. This crusade to save the planet has brought something out in him. He's not the plodding, boring robot that he used to be. He's a passionate, messianic robot. He's en fuego, as the Romans used to say.

According to Al, in just the past six months -- the past six months -- the planet's temperature has gone up 1.5 degrees Celsius. It's the biggest leap in temperature ever recorded in such a short period of time. Worse yet, a huge chunk of Iceland fell off a few weeks ago. The biggest chunk ever. A chunk the size of Greenland. Don't bother looking for any articles about this in the media. They're all too busy trying to get paparazzi photos of Paris Hilton gnawing on dildoes in her jail cell. The ocean temperature has also gone up so much that fish like tuna and swordfish are migrating to the wrong places and fishermen can't figure out how to find them, which I guess from the perspective of Greenpeace is a good thing, but still. Most scary of all is that the ocean levels have risen in some places by as much as a foot in the past 12 months. If the current rate of ocean warming and rising continues, according to Al, by the year 2010 one-third of the United States will be underwater, and that water will be the temperature of a warm bath. By 2020 more than half the nation will be submerged, and the water will be boiling. We'll be boiled alive, in our own homes, like lobsters in a pot. It will happen so slowly that we won't even notice it until we're dead.

People, we can't put Hilary in the White House. We just can't. She's obsessed with health care and isn't paying any attention to our imminent lobsterization. Obama isn't any better. We need Al. I told him that last night. I've been telling him that for months. I know, deep in his heart, that he wants to do it. But something is holding him back. I guess it's the deep psychic wounds from his defeat in 2000.

We're going to have to recruit him. A reader named Dave wrote to me today suggesting that we should start by choosing Al Gore's campaign song, the way Hilary ran a contest to find her dumbass song by Celine Dion. (Which by the way is reason enough not to vote for her.) If someone wants to set up a YouTube channel, by all means, do it and I'll promote it here, and link to good submissions. My song suggestions so far are these: "Higher Ground" by Stevie Wonder or "I Want to Take You Higher" by Sly & the Family Stone. Or "Blowin' in the Wind" not because it has anything to do with global warming but because it's the greatest song ever written in all of human history.

You thought the Greentards were bad

Now some other idiots are saying that we've got blood on our hands because our products contain some material that is mined in some way that is bad or causes wars in Africa or something. Talk about a buzz kill. Seriously. Not cool, people.

We hired that Zunetard tattoo guy and put him to work polishing giant iPhones in our store windows

Sort of an ironic statement. Classy move, right?

Yes, we paid Microsoft's ad agency to make this ad

Best part is that the dopes at Microsoft creamed their jeans over it. Seriously, this has to be the lamest advertisement ever made. It looks like two dicks trading genital warts.

Hello, this is Brad, may I have your Windows Vista serial number please?

Another reason to buy Vista. First-class tech support. Trust me, you're gonna need it.

Goatberg, your ass is mine

So here's the inside story. We gave iPhones to 10 very special media people but we put them all under super-strict NDAs. One of the rules was that they could not even tell people they had the devices. So what does Goatberg do? The very day he gets his iPhone he goes to some conference sponsored by the Chronicle of Higher Ed and shows the thing off to the audience and starts saying what things he does and doesn't like about it. I wrote about it here. What I didn't write about was the fact that I chewed him out bigtime after this happened and now we're in this big feud. Which is partly why he's preparing his big hatchet job. Frankly I wanted to take back his iPhone since he violated the NDA terms but our PR people said we couldn't do that because Walt is too important.

Embargo on reviews ends Tuesday at 6 p.m. so you'll probably see some of these a-holes posting at 6:01. Or hell for all I know Walt won't honor that agreement either and he'll put his review up early. Who knows? The great Goatberg can do as he pleases, apparently, and doesn't have to honor legal agreements. Well even if he hatchets us we'll likely get good ink elsewhere. Pogue at the Times has one, naturally. Also Bob Levitus of the Houston Chronicle (cough asshole cough) and Jason Snell of Macworld.

Bit of a warning to Walt: You're on thin ice, brother. I'm this close to never letting you have another one of our products to review. Keep that in mind when you sit down to write your review.

Vista more secure than Linux and OS X -- according to Microsoft. Ahem.

And the dumbasses at eWeek help them publicize this lie. See here. What utter shitbags. Despicable.

I really don't care about money

But this caught my attention. I don't know what "daily reach" means and I've never heard of Buzz Machine, but I guess it's cool that we're getting lots of readers. Or buzz. Or whatever. Much love, Fred. I'm easy to reach. Little button, just to the right. Under the word "Namaste," which is a Tibetan word meaning "joy and peace be unto you in the form of wheelbarrows of greenbacks."

Zunetard offered a job at Microsoft

Or something. See here.

iPhone love-hate roundup

LOVE
A restaurant wine director describes running into an Apple employee with an iPhone here. Much love to the Wall Street hotshot who sent this in, and yes, I realize you're just trying to flog the stock. Fine by me.

David Pogue of the Times is overwhelmed by questions about the iPhone. See here.

Squirrel Boy pumps up the hype and hints at future Apple-Google collaboration here.

HATE
Some douchebag blogger calls for a boycott until July 2 so we won't get any revenue in our June quarter. Right. When this effort fails you can go piss up a rope. See here. Tip o' the hat to Sam for sending this in.

The geeks at Gartner are advising clients to avoid the iPhone because it doesn't have a firewall and isn't ready for the enterprise. See here. Namaste to Matt for the link.

InformationWeek says hackers are going to attack the iPhone like starving Portugalians going after a plate of bacalhau. See here.

Squirrel Boy video

The guy who made the My Little Pony tribute video has now created a video tribute to Squirrel Boy. Much love, Jon. But I warn you. You are going to hell.

We're deploying iPhone security squads

Just got this note via email. No idea if it's true or a hoax:

"You can use this information, but I am not disclosing who or where I am for the safety of my job.

"I am a corporate security guard/body guard and will be posted outside of an AT&T store in my area as a plain clothes. The company I work for has five stores to cover, and at each store will be a guard in a business suit. We're posted there from closing time the night of the 28th till the store employees return the morning of the 29th. My company was very vague, but thought that there would be store employees there as well setting up for the next day.

"This is really unusual, we don't come cheap, and we are highly trained, all ex-military, all combat veterans. We normally do close security for wealthy people in the area. So either AT&T is really worried about theft of iPhones the night before it's release, or they have specific threats and we are being sent in as a precaution.

"Personally I'll be buying my iPhone on the 29th. It's great for people in my work with all the down time at work that we end up with. Nothing like watching a movie while waiting for nothing to happen."

As I said up top, I don't know if this is true or not. But I can tell you that we're deploying our own Apple security squads outside Apple stores. Ours will not be "plain clothes" however. They're going to be in full Star Wars body armor and helmets (see above), carrying machine guns and accompanied by attack dogs. Just how we roll.

Your word against ours, frigtard

Check this out. This dope spilled liquid into his MacBook then tried to get us to fix it under warranty. He swears he didn't spill anything but come on. You think we can't tell when we open the thing up? So in protest he smashes the MacBook with a sledgehammer. We've strongly encouraged him to start buying Dell machines. Much love to reader Gregory who sent in this link.

Once in a while CNET publishes something brilliant

And it's almost always by Michael Kanellos. I'm starting to realize that he's probably the cleverest tech journo out there. For his latest, see here.

Today's Apple backlash roundup

This just in from Steve and Katie, who are keeping an eye on the media whores. First up: Some svelte genius from the Baltimore Sun says you should wait for version 2.0 of the iPhone. Next, some publication called ExtremeTech bashes my WWDC keynote and even mocks my clothing. Finally the Napa Valley Register, a must-read in the Valley, actually says nice things about me and Apple. So the only publication left in the world that will say nice things about us is the friggin Napa Valley Register? Jesus. I think we've hit bottom.

News flash: Goatberg is in the Valley

The bastard. Tells us he's "too busy" to travel and then figures he can slip in without anyone noticing and get some big "software visionary" award [shurely shome mishtake?!] at Heidi Roizen's house in Atherton last night. Worse yet, traitorberg was out there rubbing elbows and yukking it up with my old pals Dan'l Lewin and Mike Moritz. World-class reporter Tom Foremski writes it up here. Trip Hawkins got an award too and told a story about how one day when he was working at Apple I came to his office and asked him if he'd ever taken LSD (because, come on, the guy's name is Trip, for Christ's sake) and then I walked out when he said no. Ha ha, poor old working-class Steve didn't know the WASP meaning of the name "Trip." Funny, right? They all had a big laugh at my expense. Bigger news: According to Foremski, Kara Swisher announced that she's gay. Who knew? Anyway, we've sent Katie Cotton and Steve Dowling out to find Goatberg, taser him, drug him, and bring him in for a hypno-briefing. Fingers crossed, Apple faithful!

Holy crap. Goatberg is preparing a negative review

This is what our PR spies are picking up on anyway, based on their supposedly casual chats with Walt. He's being cryptic and evasive, as usual, but from reading between the lines they sense there's a hatchet job coming. Partly it's just that Goatberg wants to redeem himself and regain some semblance of integrity by finally saying something negative about an Apple product. Where better to do this than on the most overhyped product in world history?

For another thing apparently Goatberg is having trouble using his hooves on the touch screen keyboard and he's suggesting we should have done a keyboard that shows up in landscape mode like this so we could make the buttons bigger. With anyone else we'd just shrug this off but Goatberg is too powerful to ignore. We're trying to fly him in for a briefing, during which I'll flatter him and lie to him about what's going to be in version 2.0 and meanwhile attempt to re-hypnotize him and save the day. It's a desperate move and I suspect he's on to us. So far he's hunkered down in his goat pen, insisting he's "too busy" to travel. Quelle surprise as they say in Italian.

Freetards are trying to make an iPhone clone

See info on the OpenMoko project here. The open source nitwits figure they can make an open-source iPhone. You know, with Lars and Helmutt firing in some code from Helsinki and putting it under GPLv2, Rurik chipping in GPLv3 code from Moscow when things get slow on the malware farm, and a bunch of dudes in China who are fronting for the Chinese government tossing in some backdoors and exploits, and Richard Stallman acting as project manager, legal authority and arbiter of look and feel. Yup. That'll work out great. Those apps will all be easy to use and interoperate seamlessly. Uh-huh. Things will work great as long as you don't want to use any apps that Richard Stallman doesn't control, and don't want to download any music that Richard Stallman doesn't approve of, and don't let Richard Stallman get mad about something and change the license on you. But you've got to admit, she's a beauty, ain't she?

UPDATE. This just in from a reader: "The freetards working on the iPhone 'competitor' have posted a page where they compare their hardware with the iPhone. [It's here.] By their own admission their phone is larger, heavier, has a smaller screen, less memory, no EDGE, WiFi in "phase 1+" (i.e. never), no camera, USB 1.1 only, will be available after the iPhone, none of the software is written and finally... TWO buttons."

Much love for the tip. Namaste.

The Register says Google is gonna buy Apple

Or, er, not really. See here. The Register, Britain's finest tech publication, just rehashes the rumor that was in the New York magazine article. (As I've said before, God forbid a Brit publication would actually develop sources and interview people; that sounds like work.) Great thing is the rumor of a Google buyout in New York mag came from an unnamed "friend" of mine who is quoted in the piece saying I've mellowed and that I probably want to go do something else. (Think about this. First of all I don't have any friends. Second, do you really believe any of my quasi-friends talked to a reporter without my permission?)

So the idea I guess would be that we'd bring Squirrel Boy onto the board for a while, let him learn all about the company and develop a comfort level, and then at some point Apple becomes the consumer-facing side of the Google cloud operation. The combined company controls search, and controls the utility computing data centers that Google is still secretly building, a virtual supercomputer girding the globe, in effect the world's most powerful single machine which in ten years will be delivering not just email and word processing but also television programming, movies, games and phone calls. Basically, everything. Cable companies? Phone companies? Our kids won't know what they were, unless they look them up on Wikipedia, using GoogleNet.

What does Apple bring to the party? We have the best UI engineers in the world, plus a really slick Unix-based desktop OS that meshes pretty easily with Google's Linux-based back end. (Yeah, our engineers have tinkered together.) Sure our desktop OS has very little market share, but perhaps we boost that by evolving the Mac and selling loads of iPhones and also creating some new kind of home computing appliance or even a Google-branded business appliance that puts a pretty face on all those in-the-cloud Google applications and makes them work together really well and interoperate easily with our iLife suite, which just happens to complement Google's applications.

Meanwhile Microsoft keeps cranking out its bloated, butt-ugly OS and apps, and struggles to figure out search, and struggles to develop its Live stuff, and struggles to fight off Linux in the desktop and server markets, a taxing and exhausting battle that ends up being pointless when customers stop building data centers and instead run everything in Google's cloud, on Google's version of Linux, or Open Solaris, or some OS that Google develops on its own.

So let's think about this. Does it make any sense? Hmmm. Nah. Makes no sense at all.

At this point even I'm sick of the iPhone, and I invented the friggin thing

Honestly. I mean it's great. I've been using one for months. It does all the stuff it's supposed to do. I love it. But come on people. It won't cure cancer or regrow your hair or make you lose weight. For that you'll need Linux, from what I'm told. It's just a phone. You make calls, you can listen to music, you can do some Web surfing. And if you use a Mac it will integrate really well with your computer. And that's it. I'm sorry I ever said that line about reinventing the phone. I should have just said, Oh, yeah, here, we made this phone, try it out and let us know if you like it. It's the old double-edged sword of product hype. On the one hand you want to pump stuff up and sell it; that's just your natural inclination. The risk is that people will actually believe your hype, and hold you to it. Which is exactly what happened here. Yeah. Not good. But then again, that's why we have PR people. And ours are the best in the world. Most are former CIA, young guys and gals who got a few years in at the agency and then decided they didn't like it. We pay them four times what they made with the agency and hold them to fewer rules and regulations. The whole torture thing? Perfectly okay with us.

Denton re-dentons -- again!

Apparently peeved because we pointed out his Disney-DreamWorks mistake, ace reporter Nick Denton of Gawker and Valleywag fame now points out that when I posted this item about Opera, I said Opera was in Iceland, not Norway. Imagine that! Go here and scroll down to his comment. Says Nick: "Error spotted by Fake Steve Jobs -- who's "dentoning" himself these days. He picked up on a good story about a boardroom row at Norwegian browser maker, Opera. But then placed the company in Iceland. Oops." Dr. Evil did not, however, correct me for calling the CEO of Opera an "Eskimo." Perhaps he believes the dude really is an Eskimo?

Folks, it's official: Nick Denton, the world's most famous blogger, has joined the ranks of the clueless commentards who write in to correct FSJ's foreign language and geography mistakes. Stunning. Worse yet is that the only reason the macrocephalic sodomite ran across my Iceland "mistake" was that he was busy stealing that item and putting it on his own wretched blog. You'd think he'd at least have the decency to pay me his going rate of $200 per item. No guff, kids. That's what the King of Blog Media pays his hacks -- a measly two bills per item. And that's for premium items. No wonder he gets the best talent in the biz. Well, you've got to hand it to him. He's got a great business going there.

UPDATE: I'm told the $200 per post figure is wrong. It's actually $25. Ouch. Mr. Bigglesworth is gonna be living on cat food. FSJ regrets the error.

iPhone backlash roundup

Slate fires up a colon blast here. CNET delivers a BOHICA here. Some blog notices that Forbes has been bashing us like crazy and that their stories seem to be conveniently positioned near advertisements for Blackberries, here. The Onion does their not-as-funny-as-they-used-to-be effort here. Great work, losers. Keep it coming. Our PR people are building a nice thick file on all of you.

If this movie doesn't make you want to buy Microsoft Surface, nothing will

No, we didn't make this video. But I wish we did. Much love to the reader who sent in this link via comments. And a big namaste to its creator, SarcasticGamer.com, whoever that is.

Disney? DreamWorks? WTF? Valleywag dentons it again

The PR folks at Disney sent this up to our folks in Cupertino and I happened to come across it while scanning through Katie Cotton's email inbox. Graybearded sodomite Nick Denton has struck again. This time he's snarking on a video startup called Veoh which has Michael Eisner on its board and is offering up a pirated version of Shrek 3, which Scoop Denton attributes to "Disney Studios." And Disney, you see, is where Michael Eisner used to work. Geddit? Michael Eisner is on the board of a company that's distributing pirated Disney movies. Hoo-eey! Score another snarky scoop for that deeply wired-in Valleywag team. Just the kind of snicker-snicker insidery stuff that's made Valleywag a must-read in the Valley.

Just one problem. Shrek 3 was made by DreamWorks, Disney's rival. D'oh! Several commenters pointed this out, so Scoop Denton went back in and removed the line where he originally claimed Shrek 3 came "from Disney Studios." You can see his cleaned-up version and the comments here. For the original you'll have to contact the guy who screen-grabbed it and sent it to us. Much love, Pyotr Dmitrovich.

Apparently the PR flacks at Disney are laughing their asses off over this one, having been savaged more than once by Denton & Co. Not saying the Disney people planted the fake tip, but I'm not saying they didn't either. Apparently this has become a new pastime for bored PR flacks, not just in the Valley but also in L.A. and New York. The game involves finding ways to make those oh-so-hip and oh-so-snarky Gawker sites print dumb stuff and look like idiots. It's just as easy to do as you'd imagine. They'll print practically anything you send them. No really. They will. Try it.

CORRECTION: Dick Spenton writes in to complain about our description of him as a "graybearded sodomite." He insists his beard is not gray. FSJ regrets the error.

We don't have to kill rival browsers; they're killing themselves

Check out the big scandal at Opera, the Icelandic company that makes the Opera browser. In a nutshell: the board decided to get rid of the CEO, Jon S von Tetzchner (above, in Viking helmet, holding list of names of the 20 people who use Opera). So von Tetzchnererer got wind of the coup and fired his board before they could fire him. Who even knew you could do that? Well there's a move that will encourage shareholders. Very professional. Apparently the shareholders and the board are pissed at von Tezchnerererer for several things, including a) appearing in public in a Viking helmet; b) running stupid ads like this one which depict Opera as the browser for losers with tiny phone-shaped genitals who wear pee-stained tighty-whities and live in their mother's basements; and c) for having such puny market share and losing so much friggin money.

Herr von Tetzchnererererer, let me give you some advice. When the shareholders tell the board to fire you, and you instead fire the board, that's probably not a good move. Here's another sad taste of reality for you. Even if your browser is the best browser in the world, which it isn't, but even if it were, you couldn't make it. Not against Microsoft, Mozilla (read: IBM) and Apple. There are already too many of us. Rule of thumb in a commodity market is there's room for two. Maybe three. But that's it. You're chasing crumbs, my Eskimo friend. Not sure how things work up above the Arctic Circle but down here in the Valley the office parks are littered with products like Opera, random little me-too apps and I-think-I-can gizmos that came out of nowhere and offered some interesting features and in some ways maybe were better than their competition but got crushed underfoot and forgotten anyway. We call them "The Little Engines That Couldn't."

The case against buying an iPhone

See here. The guy makes a pretty good case for holding off. In case you're wondering, yes, we're not only welcoming these "negative" stories but we're actually helping them along. I have to give Steve and Katie some credit here. The timing of the backlash couldn't be better. We lower expectations, get the bashing out of the way before the product even ships, and set ourselves up for the big rebound. To be honest we're kind of enjoying it. We're sitting here in Cupertino sipping chai lattes and admiring how creative some of these nitwits can be in their negative stories.

My favorite quote from this bash: "All 1.0 versions have bugs, hiccups and design flaws. I’m the guy who bought the original redesigned Saab in 1994 and I can tell you there were more than a few quirks. The electrical system in particular was a source of blow-outs and freaky problems for the years. For an updated model a few years later, Saab bragged about hundreds of tweaks and improvements. It needed them. The iPhone is a wholly new piece of hardware. Version 1.1 or even 2.0 might be a much better executed device."

Um, okay. The guy is comparing an iPhone, designed in California and built by highly motivated child workers in China, to a car made by lazy socialists in Sweden. Whatever.

Microsoft goes pussy

See here. Gates & Co. just caved in to demands from Squirrel Boy and have agreed to let PC makers set something other than Vista's "Instant Search" as the default search software for their hard drives. Now look. I hate Microsoft as much if not more than anyone on the planet. But in this case they're caving in for no good reason. We've integrated search into our OS too. It makes sense. And Microsoft's search stuff in Vista is really good (God I just threw up in my mouth when I wrote that) and is arguably better than what Google makes. That's what our reverse engineering team tells me anyway and they've been pounding on Vista for months. Moreover, Squirrel Boy as much as admitted this to me too.

If you ever needed proof of how badly the antitrust stuff has damaged Microsoft as a competitor, look no further. They've become like artists in the old Soviet Union, proactively censoring themselves so they won't get into trouble with the authorities. Reminds me of poor old Shostakovich, apologizing for his music. I know people think Microsoft got off easy on the antitrust stuff. I disagree. The case left them deeply damaged, internally. It damaged their soul. It messed up their DNA. It has left them timid and afraid to fight, resigned to hiding in offices in Redmond and slamming chairs in frustration because they can't go out and crack skulls in the marketplace.

Google doesn't really care about Microsoft search. They know most people will just reset their default to Google anyway. They raised this issue as a test of Microsoft's resolve. Think about it. It was about as ridiculous a claim as has ever been made: Google, the monopolist of search, the 800-pound gorilla of the Internet that rolls over its enemies and strong-arms its "business partners" (cough Ebay cough), cries foul and depicts itself as a victim. This couldn't be serious. This was a tactical maneuver to see if government lawyers would step to Google's tune (answer: yes) and to see how Microsoft would respond. Squirrel Boy was trying to gauge the enemy. It's straight out of Sun Tzu. You take your time and measure the enemy before deciding how to do battle. Microsoft folded its tents and backed down without a fight. Now the question is, Is Microsoft truly weak? Or are they using some Sun Tzu of their own, creating the impression of weakness to lure Google into a trap?

Are these guys all trying to out-pussy each other? Is this some kind of passive-aggressiveness competition, like when people stop at an intersection and each one insists that the other should go first? If you've seen "L.A. Story" you know how those situations end up.

ZDNet leads the backlash

See this blog post where a guy rounds up all the anti-iPhone articles on ZDNet blogs. There's a lot. Just to reiterate: This isn't happening because ZDNet gets ad money from Microsoft, or RIM, or Palm, or whatever. It's happening because second-rate hacks know they have to jump on the iPhone bandwagon, because it's what everyone is talking about, but they figure they can be "original" and seem less like shills if they bash it. Whatever. According to Steve Dowling the negative coverage and positive coverage are basically the same. Has something to do with sine waves and a dude named Fourier who I guess is a famous PR guy at Microsoft. Don't bust my balls on math because the last class I took was in junior year of high school, bokay? I tried to pay attention during Dowling's talk but I zoned out during the math parts and started drawing some cool new logos for Leopard and dreaming up some names for the version that will come after Leopard.

More backlash

The Journal reports here that corporate IT shops won't use the iPhone. And Forbe says here that the iPhone was created "with no thought to enterprise security" and represents "a hacker's playground." Hmmm. So the iPhone isn't good for corporate environments and IT shops? We're trying to figure out who on earth could be feeding stories like that to the press.

More media backlash

Some guy at England's finest newspaper, the Daily Mail, gives the iPhone a bad review. See here. Money quote: "Does it live up to the hype? As a phone, the answer is ‘no’."

One thing you need to know about the way the British press covers Silicon Valley, and I mean even the quasi respectable ones like the Financial Times, is this: Most of these guys aren't here in California. Many of them have never been here, in fact. They only come to the States when companies pay to fly them in and put them up, which we refuse to do, because they just spend the entire time getting drunk and stuffing their pockets with free jumbo shrimp from party buffets and hitting up the poor slobs in the U.S. press corps for info, which they then steal and put into the stories they file back to the home office. Honestly. They do no reporting. Unless you count talking to other reporters as "reporting." And that's if they're diligent. The really lazy ones (and that's most of them) just make their stuff up out of whole cloth. Take, for example, the guy who wrote the piece in the Daily Hate Mail. Rob Waugh. Has he seen an iPhone? No. Does "Rob Waugh" even exist? Nobody here has ever heard of him. For all we know it's just a made-up character with a name that's a sly reference to Evelyn Waugh, like maybe she was his grandmother or something. Geddit?

As far as I know the only British publication that actually stations someone in Silicon Valley is The Economist. And even those guys just get their stories by clipping articles from daily papers and changing the spelling to British style. Ever see an actual quote from an actual person in a story in The Economist? Once in a while, maybe. But not usually. You know that big cover story they just did on Apple? We never heard a word from them when they were putting it together.

Much love and namaste to Daily Mail reader Maggie Blackamoor for sending us the link. Keen eye, Maggie! Sorry to hear about your stomach troubles. But you're in good hands with Dr. Singh and Dr. Parikh. You'll be up and about in no time.

Nokia: We surrender

What do you expect from a bunch of filthy Swedes? Nokia's Chief Technology Officer Tero Ojanpera [ed. note, you're kidding right?] announced yesterday that touch screens are the way of the future. Nice to see Nokia waking up to this fact halfway through 2007. Kind of reminds me of Conan's "In the Year 2000" bit. Look, "Tero" -- if that really is your name -- instead of waving around that clunky phone you should have been waving a white flag. Anyway, we understand what you're saying. Saddle up the reindeer and ride off into the sunset back to your herring farm. The future belongs to Apple.

Pre-orders for Leopard rank #2 on Amazon

Check out the best seller list. Leopard ranks #2. Leopard family pack is #5. Windows XP is down in the teens. Worse, Vista is ranked seventy-something. Even Ubuntu is ahead of Vista. Who the hell bought those 20 million copies?

Check out the Apple Japan company meeting

Ever wonder how we get the best work out of our engineers? Sure there's the threat of getting fired. Better yet is the threat of, well, you'll see. Here's a game we played at our all-company meeting last week. We ask each engineer a fairly difficult question. Get it wrong, and you pay the price. In case you're wondering, no, I did not invent this game. Larry Ellison did. He uses it with his management team at headquarters in Redwood Shores. Chuck Phillips cries every time. Safra Catz just grits her teeth and says, "Do it again, bitch."

Jerry Yang now sporting black mock turtlenecks

Jerry, come on. The whole "resurrection" narrative has already been done, by me, and better than you'll ever do it. And dressing like me isn't going to turn you into me. There's no special power in the mock turtleneck, despite what Issey Miyake might claim. And Yahoo's problem isn't that it lacks a charismatic visionary leader. Anyway, kid, knock yourself out.

I was never very impressed by Terry Semel, to be honest

Nice guy, but kind of an empty suit. One thing people outside the industry don't realize is how hard it is to come to the Valley as an outsider and make a go of anything. The guys in Hollywood think they can cut it because they're in such a nasty business. But they have no idea how evil people are here (cough Tom Perkins) and they have no idea of the scale. Apple alone is twice the size of the entire U.S. box office. And we're just a slice of the tech industry. In aggregate, the tech industry dwarfs Hollywood. There's way more money involved. Guys like Semel come up here and they're just overwhelmed. Another issue is that it's tough to run a tech shop when you're not a techie yourself, or at least, as in my case, you've been around techies long enough to know when they're bullshitting you. From what I'm told the engineers at Yahoo had a running contest to see who could tell Semel the most outrageous lie and get away with it. Best one was a thing they called the Associative Speculative Search algorithm. They had 12 guys from IIT Bombay who were supposedly working on it; in fact they were down in some lab playing World of Warcraft.

As for Jerry Yang, don't get me started. First time I met him I mentioned Frank Gehry and he said, "Is that the new guy they just hired at Google?" Terry Semel at least can go back to Hollywood. I loved him in all those Christopher Guest movies.

Valleywag: Natalie Portman in talks to replace Semel at Yahoo

Whoops. Correction: It's Bill Pullman, the guy who played the president in "Independence Day." Wait. What's that? Nope, not him either. Never mind. Goddamn venture capitalists, messing with our heads.

Do NOT buy this idiot an iPhone

Check out this pathetic loser who created a website to beg people to send him money for an iPhone. What makes me sick is that apparently a lot of people actually did send him money. Folks, people who look like this, with the unibrow and the dumb eyewear, are not going to be allowed to buy iPhones. Okay? Supplies are limited, and we're starting out with attractive people only. We've hired screeners for Apple and AT&T retail outlets. So please. No more money to this moron. I beg you.

Confession: I cannot for the life of me understand WiFi routers

I mean seriously people it's friggin 2007 and you still need to be some kind of wiener brain nerd just to get a home WiFi network up and running. WTF with all the constant little breakdowns and flakiness? And God help if you need tech support. You end up hunting around on Google trying to find out how to do some simple thing. Jesus. And yeah, I know, I'm the supreme being of all computing, but I'll be honest with you, I have no idea how to configure these goddamn things. 192.168.1.1, and then what? Some goddamn butt-ugly screen full of choices that make no sense. "Oh it just works." Yeah right. I end up having Apple's IT director send a guy over to my house to straighten things out. I know exactly what the prick is thinking: "Big Mr. Steve Jobs can't figure out how to choose the settings on his Airport Extreme router, wow, what a genius, no wonder you're worth five billion bucks and I'm working in the IT shop of your company ... blah blah." Fair enough. It's embarrassing. Except not really because why should I apologize for the fact that their product blows? Oh wait. Never mind.

Veronica Belmont dissing the iPhone?

Ronnie, how could you do this to me? Calling it lame? Oh girl, you know how to hurt me. FWIW, I don't like the new haircut. But you're still the most beautiful woman on Internet TV.

Another reason to remove Firefox from your computer

Here we go again with the cheesy exploitative marketing, using sexy women to push products. This alone is reason to uninstall Firefox from your machines and replace it with Safari. We would never, ever do something like this. Way unprofessional. Folks, if anyone finds other examples of this kind of sicko marketing from the never-get-laid guys at Mozilla, please send them along so I can publish the horrid photos and shame these evil people. Seriously, send them in.

Mozilla, it is time for you to die

Look, Mozilla people, I know you complained about the pie charts that I put up at WWDC last week showing Mozilla being erased from the browser market in the near future. I know you resent the fact that Apple is a big powerful company and you're just a bunch of amateurs who've had some luck hacking together a browser that is, let's be honest, pretty darn good. But guys, think about this. You've been in the market for 20 years now and you've got 15% market share. You've given it your best shot, and the market has voted, and you've lost. I know it hurts to hear this. But you've lost. Now it's our turn. I guarantee you we'll do a better job than you've done. And fair enough, I did recently admit that I use Firefox. I only said that to get my guys fired up. And it worked. They are determined to crush you. Sorry. I'm sure you'll find work elsewhere. I hear the Debian team needs some fresh blood. Peace out.

The backlash begins

I warned you about the backlash. Here it is. Hold your noses and put on your spatter smocks, kids, because this one is a full-on hatchet job, and even goes so far as to lead in with an unflattering physical description of me, which is always the mark of the total pitbull attack piece. Nice touch right up top is where the writer, John Heilemann, uses the phrases "enfant terrible" and "eminence grise" in his first paragraph, just to let you know he took some Latin in high school. You see, this is New York magazine, whose motto is, "No, um, we're not The New Yorker, but we'd like to be," and where everyone has a tiny dick complex because they really want to be working at the New Yorker and they would be, maybe, if they didn't suck so bad. But they do. So what do you get? Pages and pages of overblown, puffed-up prose, mostly rehashing old info (Steve Jobs is an asshole) but done in this breathless, long-sentence style that's meant to make you think you're reading a really smart Malcolm Gladwell-style piece of business journalism. Executive summary for those of you too lazy to read the entire awful eight pages: Everyone in the phone business is scared about the iPhone, and they're hoping it will be a flop, but nobody (including John Heilemann) can say yet whether it will sink or swim; Steve Jobs is a dick and everyone hates him and if the iPhone fails his career is over.

Sorry, John Heilemann, but when you set us up with a big cover calling me iGod and making me look like shit, and when you get half the magazine for your story, we expect you to deliver something new, something interesting, something jarring, something smart. In short, something we didn't know before. We'd also expect you to maybe find out something bad, or to at least have the balls to say you think the iPhone is going to flop, instead of saying "maybe it will, maybe it won't." For that matter you might do your readers the courtesy of admitting that you hate me for arousing such feelings of man-lust in your tiny heart, and that your obsession with El Jobso is a way of masking (and, paradoxically, indulging) the hard-on you have for me. You might also just admit that New York magazine is just trying to cash in on the hype around the iPhone and looking for any excuse to put my face on your cover so you can sell more copies; but you think you can look cool if you dress it up as some kind of cynical, pseudo-psychological deep-think business piece.

Instead, John, you just come off looking like some guy who wishes he still worked at the New Yorker.

Right. As if. Friend, you're getting an Azzie award.

Nick Denton, Owen Thomas named to Vanity Fair "New Establishment" List

Big news for Gawker Media prez Nick Denton and his new protege Owen "Mr. Bigglesworth" Thomas (above). They've made the Vanity Fair list of people who matter. Not the official list, but the spoof one that the kids in the CN building pass around. They call it the "As If" list, or "the Azzies." Other recipients: Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Mark Cuban and Jason Calacanis. Poor Calacanis actually thought it was a real award and threw some big party for himself. And today he declared on his blog that he is more important than Bill Gates, Alan Greenspan and Martha Stewart. Dude, get a grip. You flogged a piece of shit blog network to AOL for $25 million and scooted out before they realized it's worthless. This does not make you a Master of the Universe. Sorry. Denton and Thomas, meanwhile, responded by vowing to figure out once and for all who Graydon Carter is.

BTW, I'm thinking we should do our own Azzies award ceremony, perhaps by category. Nominations welcome, especially if they include a reason why this person should receive an Azzie.

iPhone countdown widget

Get yours here.

Speaking of firing people

That friggin traitor Jon Ive almost got it today too. Guess he didn't think the Jobsmeister would be coming to work on a Saturday so he figured it would be safe to have his Lenovo ThinkPad Reserve Edition delivered to his office. Wrong, sucka. Every package that comes into the building is reported to me -- along with every email and phone call, in or out. I flew down to the mail room and got the Lenovo box and delivered it to Jon personally. He's like, Gulp. He tries to tell me it's a gift for someone else, and the initials JPI aren't his. Then he mumbled something about how he just got it to study it and check out the competition, like it's just some kind of research project. Whatever. I actually did fire him. But he went over my head to Jerry York, and Jerry told him he could stay. I hate when that happens. Jon Ive, I'm watching you.

Where the fuck are the new Macs?

Jesus friggin Christ. We've gone almost three hundred days without freshness. I just had a meeting with the hardtards and went medieval on their asses. They gave me all sorts of pathetic excuses, including trying to blame the child workers in our Chinese factories, but I'm just not hearing it anymore. I spent an hour screaming at them and insulting their mothers and telling them why they suck and how they should never have been hired here and they're stupid and I'll make sure that they never work anywhere in the Valley ever again. Then I fired three of them and had them frog-marched out of the building and told the rest of them I'm going to fire one of them a week until the new machines are done.

Trust me, Apple faithful. You don't want to see me when I'm angry. And right now El Jobso is in full Rambo mode. The new hardware will be here soon, I promise.

Another attempt to reveal my identity

See here. I'm not saying yes, I'm not saying no. But look. I called the one-button iPhone. I gave you hints on the ZFS thing and the Safari thing. I told you that Cringely had the DVD thing wrong. Just saying.

Deutschland, Deutschland uber Greenpeace

Check out this photo of a German police boat driving over some Greentards who were trying to protest at the G8. Bad news is no activists were killed; but one was sliced up pretty badly by the props, so it wasn't a total loss. Katie Cotton is looking into buying a fleet of these boats for us, including one that I'll drive that has a stealth-mode electric motor and a keel made of razor blades. Perfect for slicing and dicing Greenpeace hippies.

Apple faithful, we must prepare together for the media backlash

Apple fans, re-hypnotize yourselves with the photo above and get ready for the wave of anti-Apple stories, because I can feel it coming. I've been in this business long enough to know how it works. They boost you up and hype your stuff and turn you into the reincarnation of Buddha himself; then they tear you down. It's not their fault. It's what they do. The big thing to know about the media is that they're not out there "covering stories." The way to think about the media is that it's basically the same as one of those TV soap operas that's been on the air for twenty or thirty years. The story just rolls on, curving and unfurling, no matter who the actors are and no matter who the writers are. The story itself is bigger than the actors or the writers. The filthy hacks at the Journal are basically no different than the aspiring novelists and screenwriters who take jobs writing for "General Hospital"; they've been hired on to the show for a few years and they're doing their best to keep it entertaining. People like me are the characters in the soap opera and what you realize early on if you're in my position is that you don't have much more control over the plot than do the actors who play roles in a TV soap opera. The trick is to figure out what part the filthy bastards are imposing on you and then to surf that wave and make the best of it.

It's also worth remembering that the writers don't have any control either. We tend to blame the reporters but really it's not their fault. They have to do as they're told. The story has certain demands. Heroes achieve things and win; then they fuck up and fall; then they dust themselves off and overcome obstacles and climb back into the ring, blah blah blah. The writers just make up the details to keep it colorful.

Anyway, the backlash is coming. Sooner rather than later some a-hole who thinks he's really smart is going to write the "contrarian" piece saying Apple is crap. Of course this point of view is not really contrarian at all; in fact it's inevitable, and it's a requirement of the overarching narrative that we're all part of. But whatever. He'll think he's a big bad ass who's figured something out before everyone else and dares to say it out loud. You know why this is? Because most of the poor dimwits who work in the media are so clueless that they don't realize they're part of a big overarching ongoing story. They're like the pod people in "The Matrix," churning away at their computers, totally unaware of the reality in which they're living. They don't realize that they're just harnessed to the soap opera that's writing itself with or without them; most of them really think they're "breaking" stories and shaping the news. Poor saps. The fact is that all the journalists I've ever met boasted a combination of incredible naivete and limited intelligence with an exaggerated sense of self-importance and a wrongheaded belief that they are a great deal smarter than the people they interview. Without those things you just couldn't do their job.

In our case right now the backlash started with Dvorak, that grumpy old liver-spotted bastard, saying maybe it's time to start shorting Apple stock. More recently we've seen the general grumbling about the WWDC keynote and how it lacked sparkle. The great thing about the press and their ongoing narrative is that this makes them utterly friggin predictable. Steve Dowling and I sat around yesterday in a PR strategy session and mapped out exactly what the papers will do. Here are some data points:

* The stock is too high, has gone up too fast, is due for a "correction."

* We've hyped the iPhone so much that it can never live up to the expectations we've created and therefore is bound to be a disappointment. The touch screen is going to drive people nuts.

* The iPod is great but at this point we can't sell any more than we already do, so there's no way to go but down.

* Apple TV is a flop.

* Leopard is late, a sign we're struggling in the labs.

* Leopard is a letdown. The first glimpse of it got tepid reviews in general and some, like Mary Jo Creepy, actually claimed we're stealing from Vista.

* The current iMacs and Mac Mini have gone nearly 300 days without a refresh; we've lost our way.

* Technology is changing again and iTunes-to-iPod model isn't the way of the future; it's going to be streaming technology and we don't play a role there.

* Movie companies aren't getting on board with iTunes.

* Vista got bashed for being such a hardware hog but Leopard is going to be just as power hungry, needing at least 2 gigs of RAM to run decently.

The question is, how do we respond? Do we fight it? We think not. It would be like fighting a tsunami. Better off to get to high ground and ride out the storm. I call it the Obi-Wan Kenobi defense. I put on my brown robe, turn off my light saber, and just let the bad guys attack me. It's a necessary part of the story. The story needs me to fail now, to suffer, so that then I can come back in even greater glory. It's like Jesus -- no crucifixion, no resurrection. Media whores, listen to me: If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.

Joy of Tech has figured it out

See this comic where a team of Apple techies is put to work trying to figure out why my keynote sucked and why suddenly the shine is rubbing off the old Apple. Answer: My recent proximity to Beastmaster Bill at the D conference. Nice work, JoT. Much love.

This makes me sick

Honestly, folks, look. I'm a dude, and just like most dudes, I like chicks. But I am not down with this new trend of exploiting women to sell consumer electronics. Sure, we have hot chicks dancing in our silhouette ads. But that's different. Anyway, if you want to see the site where the above photo originates, go here. There are others like it, even more sickening, showing women in lingerie posing with iPods and so on. Please know that these photos on T3, whatever that is, are not sanctioned by Apple. I'm posting it here just to let you know about this so you can write to T3 and express your disapproval. I'm just going to keep on posting these whenever I find them in order to shame these exploiters. For shame, T3. Whoever you are.

Why our market share is higher in Europe

I'm often asked why our market share in Europe is always a few ticks higher than in the United States. It's something we've been aware of for some time now and to be honest we take it as a compliment. Mostly it just reflects the higher standards that Europeans bring to everything they do. They're more demanding and, let's face it, more sophisticated than Americans. For that reason we've always staffed our design teams with mostly Europeans. I think that has really informed our sensibility and it also explains why our products appeal to Europeans. Europeans place a higher value on great design than Americans do, they're more willing to pay high prices as long as they're getting a quality product. But you can't fool Europeans. They're way too savvy. They can spot a fake a mile away and they will not fall for it. And they will not hesitate to correct you or tell you you're wrong when you've made a mistake. We value that criticism and feel that it drives us to do better. So thank you, Europeans, for supporting Apple. You're going to love our next-gen iMacs, trust me. They were designed with you guys in mind.

UPDATE: I've just been informed that our market share in Europe is actually lower than in the United States. So, um, disregard the above comments.

This site is so hot

Check it out. It's a web site where chicks in Denmark put on bikinis and smash stuff. This clip shows a girl named Tatjana smashing a PowerBook. Just shows you what happens when you live in a country where marijuana is legal and they sell hash in the cafes.

New ads

Check out our New York ads. Very cool. I wrote the scripts myself and directed the shoots. Very proud of my work on these. We're pretty sure they're going to win awards. For the credits I used the name "Alec Sutherland" which for those of you who aren't in the business is a kind of fake name like Alan Smithee. Why a fake name? I'm all about the modesty and humility and I don't need to grab credit for everything. It's just not how I roll. BTW, I also make a cameo appearance in the 60-second spot. Watch closely and maybe you can figure out which one I am. Peace out.

Confession: Sometimes Larry and I get baked and watch Criss Angel Mindfreak

Fair enough, it's embarrassing. I know his Mindfreak act is stupid and totally fake. But if you're high enough some of the tricks are pretty cool. Plus I like checking out all the elements of my act that Criss Angel has incorporated into his own shtick. The eyes, mostly. But also the use of misdirection. Larry says I should sue the guy. "This spray-tanned punk has just ripped off your act, note for note," he says. "He's like a mix of you and Joe Perry." My feeling is that we're in such different industries that it's not a threat. Now if Criss Angel decided to start selling consumer electronics and claiming they possessed magical powers and quasi-religious significance, well, then we'd have a fight on our hands. As long as he sticks to fake levitation and fake sawing people in half, we're cool. Whether Joe Perry wants to sue is up to him.

Caption winners

Karl


Jason

Readers seemed to like Karl's item about "Harvard Steak House" [shurely Pinocchio's or Grendel's?] but I liked Jason's item about the pies, though I think it would be better without the explainer line.

From a reader

Dear Ashlee Vance: Bite me

Ashlee Vance, the girl-named reporter for the Register, complains because we wouldn't let him attend WWDC, even though he's bought a lot of Macs in his life. Boo friggin hoo, loser. You think you can smack-talk us and we're just going to take it? You think we're just a bunch of punks? Friend, you're the one with the lady-boy name, not us. In an attempt to win us over, Ashlee calls our PR people "impolite robots." Nice move, dick. For the record, we only hire polite robots in our PR department.

I really don't like Jim Cramer much, but ...

I think he really nails it here with his piece about how the Journal is handling its coverage of the Murdoch takeover bid. To sum up: hypocrisy abounds. Keep that in mind next time they're drilling El Jobso over his options. Bastards.

Cutter Girl wants her stuff taken down

She says she only wanted to help promote Apple and now it's backfiring. She says she's "misunderstood" but that "for the sake of the brand please take it down." She also threatened to set herself on fire if I didn't comply. She uses that one a lot, I've noticed.

Cutter Girl, your wish is my command.

Paul Thurrott scobles himself

See this brilliant blog post where Thurrott takes the time and trouble to discuss and expand upon one of his own articles. How meta and recursive is that? Thurrott's shocking revelation is that Safari, not Leopard, is the key product at Apple these days. Best part is that after touting his own article Thurrott adds a self-congratulatory scoble to let you know how smart he is: "I think that we will all look back on this day as the time when we stopped thinking about desktop OSes and focused on the mobile, Web-based future. This might be the smartest thing Apple ever did. And so far, few have even noticed it. Yet."

Yes, few have noticed this, except you, O great Thurrott. Because you, unique among all men, understand the great master plan that underlies everything Apple does. So nice of you to bless us with your genius, and to let us know how special you are. Otherwise we might not have figured it out.

My greatest prank so far

Yes that really is a picture of yours truly on the Vista DVD. But I'm not going to tell you which one is me. Check it out here and see if you can guess.

Much love, Times of London

Ta very much for including us in your list of the 50 best business blogs. Though I'm bummed to be listed below Scoble and My Little Pony. What are you Brits smoking over there?

Mary Jo Foley, start your photocopier

Ace reporter Mary Jo Foley says Leopard looks like Vista. See here. Funny I seem to have seen that same sentiment expressed somewhere else recently.

Thinking more about Microsoft

I keep thinking about that poor Microsoft MBA dude whose job it is to get people to "unlock value" by using all the features of Microsoft programs. It seems to me this really strikes an important point about Microsoft. For years people have been begging Microsoft for leaner, simpler products with fewer features. Not just befuddled and baffled consumers but CIOs at big companies, guys who manage tens of thousands of PCs, who are considered "thought leaders," and who definitely have Microsoft's attention. They've been screaming this from the rooftops: Fewer features, greater ease of use, greater reliability. They've done everything but put up billboards on the roads around Redmond saying, "Small. Fast. Cheap. Easy." They don't want slightly fewer features. They want a lot fewer. Like 90% fewer. So what does Microsoft do? It rolls out a huge new OS and a new version of Office with a 10x gain in features. Then it hires an army of MBAs to go "unlock value" and get customers to use all those features that they've already told Microsoft they don't want.

Implicit in Microsoft's approach is the belief that customers are simply too stupid to know what they want and that it is Microsoft's job to teach them why and how they should use Microsoft's overly complex and therefore unreliable programs.

This is no joke. It's a serious problem and not easily fixed. It begins right at the top of the company, with Ballmer himself. I hate to play armchair analyst but Ballmer's roots -- a Detroit kid growing up with a dad who was a Ford manager -- are too significant to ignore. Remember Detroit in the 1970s, when customers started saying they wanted smaller, cheaper, leaner, simpler cars? Toyota and Honda listened, while the Big Three kept cranking out monstrously huge cars and then putting all sorts of effort (advertising, discounts on the lot, dealer incentives, blackballing dealers who tried to open Toyota or Honda stores, spouting empty patriotic rhetoric about buying American, blah blah) thinking that by doing this they could get customers to buy the cars that they'd already told Detroit they didn't want. This -- not Harvard, not Stanford -- was where Ballmer's worldview was formed. There at Detroit Country Day School with the other kids whose dads ran the Big Three in the last days of Detroit's golden era. Now at Microsoft we're seeing a repeat of this phenomenon.

Microsoft seems to have lost sight of the fact that its rise to power came as a result of Bill Gates positioning Windows as smaller, cheaper, easier and faster than OS/2 Presentation Manager. Windows 3.0 was lean and mean and, relatively speaking, open. OS/2 with PM was big, bloated, expensive, and all about locking you in to IBM. IBM was the big monolith trying to protect its market share and suck everything into its maw. Microsoft was the disrupter, using a little toy weapon to attack a fortress.

Ploo sa change, as they say in Russian.

Caption entries for Gates at Harvard

Are here on the captions sister site. Vote away and we'll post the winner(s) on the main site. Or don't vote and just enjoy. Or whatever.

Not so fast, My Little Pony

As pointed out here, ponyboy kind of jumped the gun when he announced last week that we'd be using ZFS in Leopard. In case you're wondering, yes, this is what happens when you make a deal with Apple and then double-cross us by announcing it before we say you can. In case you feel like a good laugh at MLP's expense, see our classic tribute video here.

What ails Microsoft

If you wonder why Microsoft can't seem to get out of its own way these days, read this terrifying first-person essay by an MBA who now works at Microsoft, in which he admits he's a "non-techie" and describes his goal as "unlocking value" from software, which he compares to chocolate chip cookies and running shoes. Now look. I love MBAs as much as the next guy. Actually I don't. But whatever. The fact is, Microsoft was better off when its staff looked like this.

Special Fred dentons it bigtime

See his big prediction from last week that I would be announcing a huge Google partnership at the keynote yesterday. Money quote: "One announcement I'm almost sure of, however : A far reaching, cloud computing partnership with Google." Better yet is that Fred not only dentoned it but he also scobled it, when he proclaimed, "Cloud computing is the hot new thing in the world of technology." Then he pulls a loomis (as in Carol) by making sure he lets you know that he has special access to the world's most powerful people: "Schmidt said in April in an interview with me ..." Right. Because Eric Schmidt has never said this same thing to anyone else in the entire world. Just to you, special Fred. This technique comes from Fred's training at Fortune, where reporters are always sitting in saunas with Andy Grove and playing ping pong with Sergey Brin and telling you all about it right at the top of their stories -- just to let you know how cool and insidery and special they are, and how these important CEOs just love hanging out with Fortune writers and asking them for advice and hearing their big ideas. Guys and gals, let me give you a little hint: We're playing you. Okay? We don't like you. We don't respect you. We friggin despise you. We laugh at you when you're not around. We take you on the private jet because we know it makes you tingle like a little girl. And then you write nice things about us.

Fred, I'm starting to think our secret dossier on you wasn't mean enough. By the way, in the spirit of "radical transparency," how soon will see a mea culpa (that's Portuguese for "apology") from you on this one? We're all sitting here holding our breath.

Now we're hearing rumors of an uber PC coming out of Portugal

Or is it Brazil? Or some country that shares a border with Portugal and Brazil -- I can't remember the name but they have some weird language that doesn't come from Indo-European and nobody can figure out where it came from. I don't know. Anyway, here's a shot of Pedro Pentelho of Companhia de Peidar Sancto showing off the Linux-based device at a press conference in Madrid earlier today. According to our engineering team this is a very nice machine and I hope you Portugalians are proud of yourselves. All those people who say Portugal is some kind of impoverished backwater should be ashamed of themselves. Now go eat some bacalhau and celebrate.

Hate mail

Hi,
I was most disgusted by your post on the opening of a shop in Lisbon. What the hell are you talking about reading lebanese and country in the middle east, are you dumb??????? Portugal is the western country on European union and the oldest nation in the world with the same territory borders for almost nine centuries, we discovered Brasil, India, Angola, Mozambique and other places while the world was still living in oblivion. We speak Portuguese and we are proud we are not a middle eastern country.
--Marco

Marco, I apologize quite deeply. I never meant to suggest that Portuguese people aren't clever, because clearly they are.

The rPhone, created by pirates for pirates

Check this out. Pretty funny.

Computerworld: Macs cheaper than Dell

See here. It's kind of stunning. If you want all the features of our $2,799 MacBook Pro you need to spend $3,459 on a Dell. I'm no good at math but Jon Ive says that's a 50% premium. Plus the Dell weighs more, is bulkier and looks like crap compared the MacBook Pro. And you're running Windows instead of OS X. Ahem. Money quote: "The MacBook Pro is a surprisingly good value."

"We should have a Mac, like everybody else in here."

So says a frustrated graphic designer in this clip after his Windows craptop died in a presentation at an Adobe conference. You think maybe the guy is a little pissed? You think maybe next time he'll spend a few extra bucks for a Mac? I'd say so. All it takes is one event like this to make you into a Mac user for life.

From the mailbox

My dearest Steve,

I'm writing you this to tell you the story of my Mac G5.

I walk into work yesterday morning (I work at ARS E-commerce in Chattanooga, TN) only to find one of my many bosses Tony sitting down outside. Tony looks at me and says "i've got bad news your computer is ruined" I thought he was full of shit but sure enough I walk into the room that i work in and everything was soaked. A sprinkler pipe had busted sometime in the night and soaked the entire room. The desks were covered in water. The keyboards were full of water. The pipe had busted directly above my desk so sure enough my Mac G5 that i cherished so much was pretty much under a gigantic waterfall of madness and water all night long. I pouted all morning long. It was surreal but shit happens. Sure enough though a few hours later Tony walks back up to me and says "Your computer booted right up. It works fine." HA! It survived! I couldn't believe it! All night long water pouring on it drenching it in dirty water and it just booted right up like nothing had happened!

So hat's off to you Steve Jobs. Just thought you'd like to hear how much Mac's kick ass!

Love,

(Name withheld)

Jesus wept

This Brad Pitt look-alike went out and got a Zune logo tattooed on his arm. See here on the "Zune Scene" website. I want to believe this is some kind of fake photo. But the link shows a closeup which looks pretty real. Well, Microsoft, you really know how to market and advertise, I'll give you that.

So Gates calls

And he's like, Hey buddy, I just spent some time looking at Leopard and I must say, you've done some nice things. Quick Look is very cool. So is the transparency stuff. And the 3-D planes floating in space. Very nice. But you know what, I kind of liked these features the first time I saw them -- where was it? Oh, that's right. In Vista. Yeah. Who's copying who, douchebag? Maybe we should sue you for copying our interface ideas, you spoiled, precious, pretentious little bitch. Ice water to people in hell huh? Well look who just dipped into hell and brought it back to the world calling it a slice of heaven. You think the media will figure this out and report it? Nah. They're too stuck on the story about how Apple innovates and Microsoft copies. They've got that story in their heads and there's no way we can dislodge it from their thick skulls. Sorry. Just kidding, bro. You do beautiful work. I mean it. You've got great taste. You stay happy with that 3 percent market share and we'll do our little thing over here.

Goatberg bragging about his iPhone

See here. Guy goes to some Chronicle of Higher Ed conference and can't resist showing off his iPhone. Fair enough, Walt wants everyone to think he's cool. Bad news is he's dissing it already. "I can already see some things I don’t like about it," he says. "I don’t know whether I’ll give it a good review or not." Trust me, Walt. You will. You definitely will. If you ever hope to speak to me again, you'll drool all over this just like you drool over everything we do.

Yes this is me, holding a Windows machine

Ugh. I can't believe it. The mystery of the Chinese uber laptop has been solved. It's not a startup. It's friggin Lenovo. They're putting out this psycho ultraportable ThinkPad Reserve Edition that costs $5,000. That's not a typo. It's aimed at the Sand Hill Road, master of the universe, hedge fund types. Loaded up with a bazillion gigahertz processor, terabyte of RAM, or something like that. Windows Vista of course. The real kicker is it comes wrapped in this super leather that's handsewn by the Japanese saddlemakers who made saddles for the samurai. Of course you get your name embossed on the case and on top of that you get white-glove service, like if you have some customer support question (and it's Windows Vista, so you know you will) they air-lift in some butler and drop him at your house. Or a team of ninjas. Or something. Naturally Larry ordered one; and then as a ballbuster he ordered one for me, too, complete with my name on it. I'm like, "Dude, I'm not going to use a StinkPad, I can't believe you even brought it into the building, forget about it." He's like, "Jobso, just check it out, because first of all the Vista Ultimate is pretty much a clone of OS X, and second of all, the fucking thing flies, it's way faster than a MacBook Pro, I did all these side by side tests, blah blah blah."

A while later I found Jon Ive and his boys in the design shop ogling the thing. Ive goes, "Steve, did you realize this was designed by Richard Sapper? Jesus Christ. The guy's a mad genius. And I hate to tell you, but this machine is pretty cool. And it's light. Feel it. Honestly. If I had shitloads of money and didn't work here I'd probably get one." I'm like, "Um, guys? Does it have a MagSafe power cord so that you don't pull it off a desk if you trip over the cord? No, I don't thinks so."

Then Larry and I went to my office and started calling Lenovo's white-glove tech support line, telling them things like, "Uh, we can't find the ANY key," and "Can you send someone over to install OS X on this thing?" Sure enough an actual butler type dude showed up. We told him we were only kidding. He was totally cool about it. Gave the machine a once-over anyway. Nice touch. Thanks, Lenovo. I will be calling every day for the next year, so keep a technician ready, 24x7. And thanks Larry. You dick.

Confession: My keynote smelled like ass

Let's be honest. It wasn't that good. I know it and you know it. I'm not going to spin it or lie to you. I've done better. Way better. But what can I do with the material I'm given? Okay, fair enough, maybe I raised everyone's expectations with all that pre-keynote smack talk about how I was going to blow minds. I should have just kept quiet. But that's not in my nature. Worse yet, I'm starting to look a little bit like John McEnroe and that worries me.

More bad news that I really don't need right now

Our manufacturing guys just got back from a trip to China and they're hearing rumors about some uber-laptop, possibly Linux-based, that's going to cost more than our top-of-the-line MacBook Pro and is going to smoke our ass. Apparently everyone over there is buzzing about this machine but nobody has actually seen it yet. There's just word of it coming out of the contract manufacturers and the component guys who've all signed NDAs but are leaking anyway. Best we can tell it's some kind of startup. I normally discount all reports like this but the dudes I talked to say they're not laughing. They say the Chinese are really getting better in a hurry. They're not just making cheap knock-offs anymore. They're focusing on design and are determined to leapfrog Western companies, in all industries. In PCs we're seen as the biggest target. And like I said, our dudes are not taking this lightly.

Back to the meditation mat. Must hurry.

Some French dude named Gilles has a hard-on for me

Check this out. This dude Gilles got upset about my recent post about Bertrand Serlet being a cyborg and posted a comment saying, "I think these remarks on Bertrand Serlet's eyes are not appropriate. I know this man to be a genius; you of all people should be aware of that." Now old Gilles has started reading the blog and commenting on other items. Like this one where he gloats about me slipping down on the Business 2.0 list of most influential people: "You are 24th right now, behind even Bill Gates. I think the 24th place is more than you deserve, by the way." I wouldn't even mention this except that negative people really upset me and this is not what I need in the run-up to my big keynote.

But check out the Blogger profile for Gilles. And check out his blog, where he writes poetry in Spanish which I don't read. See here. If anyone wants to translate some into English, I'd love to know what it says. Jon Ive, who reads a little Spanish, says the first one is about having sex with a corpse, but I find that hard to believe.

Okay, I must return to meditating before the big speech. Much love. Namaste. Peace out. Let's stay positive.

Confession: I use Firefox

Not for everything, but lately it's for most of my browsing. At first I just downloaded it to try it out. Mostly I just dabbled. Then I started adding some bookmarks. Now it's my primary browser. I know I'm supposed to use Safari. I also know that some of our software guys are pissed about me using Firefox. I told them, Go make Safari better and I'll start using it again. I also told them I was going to use my blog to seek input from readers about this. So. Any ideas on what Safari needs?

What a weekend

I'm back from the Zen center and feeling great. To be honest they actually asked me to leave early after they caught me taking pictures and surfing the Web and doing email on my iPhone. And there were some allegations of cannabis use though no evidence was found. The two grimbos on the right (who believe me are even less fun than they look here) turned me in to the Goddess lady in white, who in turn ratted me out to the big kahuna in the main temple. Fair enough. I respect the place enough to know I was out of line. I zipped out this morning, caught a high colonic with my technician, Kuso Sukatoro, and will spend the evening rehearsing my speech -- which, unlike Mr. Bill, I actually wrote myself, with paper and pen, without the assistance of a team of writers and editors and focus group testers. Jesus. I keep thinking about that story in the Journal about how Bill prepared his Harvard speech. It just strikes me as so symbolically perfect for how Bill operates and for what ails all of Microsoft. I mean, it's a commencement address. You're asked to speak to a group of graduates about your life, your hopes, your dreams. You try to speak from the heart, to be honest and candid and frank. You try to inspire them. How else can you write this speech but alone? Bill turns it over to a team that slices and dices and iterates. Then he wonders why nobody finds it inspiring. It's the same with Microsoft products. There's no artistry, no individuality, no passion. Everything they do is a cluster fuck, and it shows. Like the famous ad parody about "If Microsoft made the iPod." That was funny because it was true.

Anyway. Apple faithful, we are now in the last hours. I hope you will spend the remaining time in quiet contemplation and ritual self-cleansing. If you can't afford a professional high colonic (though they are widely available and relatively inexpensive in San Francisco) then at least go to the store and get a personal cleansing product and use it in your hotel room. Drink some green tea and go to bed early. Arrive early, wear comfortable clothes, and prepare to have your mind blown. Because this one is going to be the most awesome WWDC we've ever had. Seriously.

Comment of the week

Comes in response to this post where I mocked some guy from Opera Software, maker of the Opera browser, which I said was for "losers." An outraged Opera fan writes in:

Steve, you're a pathetic loser. You and the rest of the world knows that Apple has been a sore loser to Microsoft since birth, lol. Now you're trying to play a power role like Microsoft has done to you for so long, except this time you try to out power Opera. How pathetic is that? Honestly? Both companies are excellent and offer amazing products, but the fact is..you are basing your "truth" on opinion whereas this "Opera Man" is basing "his" on truth and fact. You told a lie and now you're unwilling to admit what kind of deceitful person you really are. I have respect for both companies and their products, but I start losing that respect for some companies when it comes to real "losers" like yourself talking this way. By the way, the Wii is a popular new console that even children and babies can play..the user interface makes it simple enough for them. ;) If you can move your hands at all with a remote in them then you can watch videos on the Wii via the Opera browser, now if that is hard for you Steve then you might consider getting a little help...since you are being such a sorry loser and all about this. Next time get your facts straight..you won't win votes from people who aren't brain washed by you unless you speak the facts...facts sell and get returning buyers more often than lies. ;)

Namaste. Much love.

Check this out. Thanks to our devoted readers, FSJ has soared to first place in the Business 2.0 listing of "Who Matters Now." Fewer votes, to be sure, but higher ratings. Apparently it's very easy to just go here, pull the slider to 100 and hit "Submit." And like that, FSJ hits #1. Oh, Biz 2.0, you had no idea what you were doing when you put me in your list, did you? The interns in Krasnodar are celebrating. Go Tigers!

Business 2.0 is running a competition

To see who the most influential business people are. Or something. They've included me. See here. I know it's wrong to rig the vote but why not have some fun is all I'm saying.

That's right, an effin' Effie!

Our "I'm a Mac" campaign just won the Grand Effie award which I'm told is akin to winning an Oscar or the Super Bowl or something of that nature. See here. Unfortunately I was unable to attend but I'm very pleased to see my work getting some recognition at last.

Hitler's ultimate downfall

This goes on too long but the first minute or so is pretty entertaining.

This just in: Lisbon is NOT in the Middle East

From the mailbox:

"Nice those news from Apple Portugal and Lisbon.

Of course you surely know that Lisbon is in Western Europe and part of the European Union (EU). So far it's the only EU country without a Apple official representation. Some more data: in Portugal people speak Portuguese (as in Brazil and several other countries in Africa and Asia). The distance between Portugal (capital: Lisbon) and Lebanon (capital: Beirut) is 4000 kilometers.

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portugal

So, in all, saying that Lisbon is in Lebanon is like saying New York is in Venezuela. I suppose Hugo Chávez would like that. ;)

-- MJ Valente

 Mac²: http://mac2.wordpress.com/"

MJ, I stand corrected. Thank you for your note. Thanks, too, to the readers who have posted comments correcting this error.

Bono calls me, drunk off his ass

He's over in Germany or someplace like that and says he's furious about how things are going at the G8. First the prime minister of Germany, Angela Merkin, told him to lighten up about Africa, which really got him steamed. And as I reported yesterday he got all pissed because politicians were breaking their promises. Shocking! Then the guy who runs Canada blew him off too. He's like, "Steve, fookin Jaysus, it's the prime minister of fookin Canada and he's coppin a tude wit me. With me! Can you believe it? I'm fookin Bono fookin Vox, man! Whatever. The whole thing's a bust. I'm sitting here on me bed drinkin and feelin sorry for myself. I mean I could be out blowing lines of coke and banging teenage groupies. But I'm not. I'm here in a meeting full of arseholes trying to save the fookin world. I don't know. Sometimes I just want to give up. I gotta hop. Adios."

Last thing I heard before he hung up was him crying. Sad, sad stuff.

Cringely, you're wrong again

Dude, stop trying to make predictions. You're hardly ever right. And you're such a creature of the 1980s, aren't you? I mean I have no idea what you look like, but whenever I imagine you I picture a guy with a flippity floppity Flock of Seagulls haircut and parachute pants. No? In this case, with your big claims about DVD encoding, you've dentoned it bigtime. Worse yet, you've also scobled it, which is California slang meaning "to declare something obvious, and then to announce your own genius in a self-congratulatory tone." Double whammy.

Java nerds imitating FSJ

Check it out here. Guys I appreciate the imitation but, um, it's Java. Nobody cares about it. Bokay?

iSupply gets it wrong again

See this article where they estimate it costs us $237 to build an Apple TV box, which we sell for $299. Problem is the prices they use for components. See there's little thing called negotiating. Companies use it to get better prices. That's all I'm going to say.

A reader asks: What percentage robot is Bertrand Serlet?

The answer is zero. Bertrand is not a robot. He's a cyborg. There's a difference. I'm not sure what it is but I'm told they're not the same. Cyborgs can cry or something. He was built by a division of Airbus in France. Later models were not as scary looking and we're considering an upgrade. Reader asks about this after seeing this article in the New York Times where they compared Bertrand to Steven Sinofsky at Microsoft, who I'm told is neither robot nor cyborg. FWIW we did not authorize this story, and I'm pretty upset that Bertrand is trying to take the credit for developing OS X when everyone knows that it's my creation, but I'm just too humble and modest to say that publicly.

Verizon's LG Prada phone stopped at the border

Court rules that this phone and others like it can't be shipped into U.S. because they use a Qualcomm chip that violates a Broadcom patent. See here. Verizon and other companies are protesting of course. Tough noogies, losers. More wind in our sails, since the iPhone isn't getting busted.

It's true, we're opening a shop in Lisbon

I don't read Lebanese but if you do you'll be heartened by this blog post and this government page describing our plans to open a subsidiary in the capital city of Portugal. No kidding, it's true. The Lisbonians are huge Apple fans but so far they've had to purchase them through middlemen companies in other countries in the Middle East.

CNET touts the "summer of Apple"

See here. You know, when I came back to Apple a decade ago I visualized all of this. And now it's coming true. It blows my mind, honestly.

Greentards think they're cute

See this insipid article where Greenpeace says Michael Dell and I are duking it out to see whose company can be greenest. Worse yet is that Greenpeace makes it seem like they're the reason this is happening, like they tricked us into fighting each other. Oh Greenpeace, you're so clever. What they don't tell you is how these Greentards shake us down in private. Basically, they're running a protection racket. We'll play along for now, guys. But watch your back.

Forbes gets it half right

See this story where they try to guess what we're going to announce at WWDC next week. Let me put it this way, Forbes. Roughly half of what you're guessing is right. But I'm not going to tell you which half. Also: depending on how some tests go this weekend, there's could be a very big hardware announcement, one that goes way beyond a simple refresh or an update. It's going to be mindblowing. If it happens, which it might or might not.

We're having some last-minute issues with the iPhone

Nothing to worry about. Just some stray charges on some units. Supposedly something to do with the battery. Our manufacturing partner assures us they'll have most of the faulty units weeded out by the time we go to market. If you get one, no harm. You'll just have loads of fun freaking people out when your phone rings.

Bill Gates, a truly original thinker

Interesting story on Page One of the Journal today (see here) about how Mr. Bill got ready for his big speech at Harvard. Turns out he takes the same approach to speechmaking that he does to writing software. That is, he begins by looking at what others have done and then copies it, but adds lots of complexity so it comes out all frigged up. In this case he read speeches by Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Enrico Fermi, Bill Clinton, Bono and others. But his biggest source of material, er, inspiration was a speech that George Marshall (yeah, I have no idea either) gave at Harvard in the 1600s or something. After selecting material to plagiarize, plus "methods and concepts," Bill brought in some writer from Slate, plus a staff of other people, and they all spent months writing drafts and having meetings and trading emails and punching things up with a few jokes about how Bill was a loser in college, and then to cap it off he gets some help from his old pal Jimmy Buffett [ed. note, shurely "Warden"?]. From this messy hodgepodge of incompatible sources and multiple authors comes the rambling, incoherent speech that Gates gave at Harvard.

In case you're wondering how Vista manages to be both entirely derivative and yet amazingly bloated and slow and turgid, well, now we know.

Contrast this to my own process of preparing for Monday's WWDC keynote. You won't be surprised to learn that at Apple we take a slightly different approach to these things. First of all, we begin not with content but with presentation. I've spent the past month rehearsing in our made-to-order exact replica of the Moscone Center auditorium, filled with 5,000 extras who play the role of Apple developers (given Nembutal to create that glazed, worshipful expression). We've got the whole super-dramatic Leni Riefenstahl Triumph of the Will stage setup going, with the 40-foot X and other large symbols of power and domination. Every day I spend hours running through my presentation, even before the actual text has been written. Hit my spot, say a line, click the remote, boom. Hit my spot, say a line, click the remote, boom. Look out at audience, turn left and right, pretend to make eye contact, try to look slightly wooden and unnatural. It's harder than it looks, trust me. It's just that I make it look easy. After rehearsal I'll spend an hour looking into a mirror working on my hypnotic gaze. Every other day I meet with my beard colorist, Annalisa, to make sure the salt-and-pepper mix is perfect. And my couture consultant Katarina brings me fresh samples of mock turtlenecks.

Today will be our last day of rehearsals, after which Katarina will present me with the actual JobsWear outfit that I'll be wearing Monday -- each piece brand new, freshly laundered and hermetically sealed in clear virgin plastic -- and I will go into retreat at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center for the weekend. Starting at sundown tonight I will begin fasting and solitary meditation. I'll eat nothing but miso soup and will not speak to anyone. By Monday I'll be five pounds lighter and so hungry I could tear someone's face off with my teeth. In other words, perfect.

New site for captions

Iulia and Natasha, the interns in Krasnodar, have set up a separate page for captions. They've put some past ones up to just see how it looks. Check it out and let us know. The idea is to keep all the captions from cluttering up the main page.

Address is: http://captions-fakesteve.blogspot.com.

Or just go here.

I'm trying to get in on this VMware offering

But my broker says he doesn't think I'll get any. I'm like, Dude, Sergey is getting some. Larry is getting some. What the frig? Well for a while my guy just said it was really tight, oversubscribed, he'd see what he could do; then he just went dark and stopped returning my calls. Now I hear from someone else that apparently I'm considered poison because of the backdating stuff at Apple and VMware doesn't want me getting anything and neither do their bankers. Fine. Just wait and see how much Apple does or doesn't do to promote the big Macintosh desktop virtualization software you guys at VMware are announcing at the WWDC next week. Oops. Was that supposed to be a surprise? Sorry.

Caption contest

Okay, it's fish in a barrel time. Here's the Beastmaster getting his law degree from Harvard today. Have at it. This time I'll store them all up in a big folder and run them all at once.

Dvorak: "I'm mad as a March hare."

Mr. Loony-Tunes says it's time to short Apple. See here. To which I can only say that in my opinion it's time to short John Dvorak. Actually, it was time to short him a long time ago. Er ... that is all.

No flies on you, Economist

I've said it before and I'll say it again -- the only business magazine worth reading is The Economist. Once again they've struck gold with this cover article telling companies what they can learn about innovation from paying attention to Apple. Sure, they mention that "the not-always-lovable Mr Jobs is still stuck in a greedy-looking share-option “backdating” scandal," and they gripe about "duff gadgets," whatever the hell that means. Why can't you friggin Brits speak English for God's sake? Anyway the killer quote of the piece comes at the end: "For the moment at least it is hard to think of a large company that better epitomises the art of innovation than Apple." Minus 2 points for misspelling "epitomize" but otherwise, yes, you're spot on.

Hey Japan, you just don't get it, do you?

NEC is touting this pink Hello Kitty laptop as a machine for "working women." I'm not making this up. See here. Much love to the reader who alerted us to this travesty.

Much love, Piper Jaffray

Analyst Gene "Herman" Munster says we're gonna ship 45 million iPhones in 2009. See here. And he raises his target price to $160. Woohoo! Piper Jaffray, you may just get a piece of our investment banking business after all.

Confession: I eat meat when no one is around

It's true. The whole vegetarian Buddhist Taoist thing is an act. I eat meat. Always have. The only person who knows is Larry. It's like a secret addiction. I'm like one of those people who seems totally normal but spends weekends snorting heroin. Only in my case it's meat. And I don't snort it, I eat it, but whatever. You understand. Not even my wife knows. I use a fake name and send away for those Omaha Steaks over the Internet and have them shipped to Larry's house. They come packed in dry ice. Larry keeps them in his freezer till I'm ready for them. I eat them over at his house. My favorite is the filet mignon wrapped in bacon. Jesus. I'm ashamed of myself. But I feel better now that I've admitted it.

I love Google Street View

Squirrel Boy keeps sending me over shots like this. Jon Ive and I are just sitting here scanning through sites like this looking for stuff to check out. And