Asshole Forbes reporter stalking our employees

This just in. Last Friday a reporter from Forbes was hanging around outside the Outback Steakhouse on De Anza Boulevard in Cupertino trying to talk to Apple employees who were going out for beers after work. Guess he wanted to know whether anyone had seen Dear Leader, and if so, what did he look like, blah blah. Word spread quickly through the engineers hanging out at BJ's, who immediately started taking turns walking down the street and pretending to be drunk and then throwing disinformation at this dickwad. One thing you hacks need to realize is that yes, our marketing and PR people receive training in how to spread fake stories, but guess what? Engineers don't even need that training. That kind of shit comes naturally to them. So here are some of the stories we're hoping to see on Forbes.com over the next few days:

1. Steve working out with Jon Ive at Apple gym and is seriously bulked up. Claims it's just protein shakes, but some of the guys suspect steroids.

2. Steve, while hospitalized in Tennessee, fired several hospital employees who could not satisfactorily answer the question, "What do you do here?"

3. Steve had two livers installed, one as fail-over. Calls it "RAID-1" configuration.

3a. No, Steve only got one liver, but the donor was Mexican and when Steve woke up he could speak fluent Spanish. Weird.

4. Steve made up "medical leave" story, was actually in Argentina visiting his mistress. Will confess at weepy press conference next week.

5. Apple tablet PC will be announced in July. Intel quad-core processor, tiny fan on back.

6. Steve seen eating cheeseburger in Caffe Macs, has apparently dropped the vegan thing.

By the way, Forbes reporter -- we know your name. We know your home address. We're working on getting your medical records. Keep this up and I swear to friggin God we will go nuclear on your ass and publish all of it. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I'm weak, I'm vulnerable, I'm having someone drive me to work and I need people to open doors for me. And so you think maybe you can push El Jobso around a little bit. Well, go ahead. Try it. Seriously. I dare you. I double-dare you. Fuckwit. I will crush you like the bug you are.

BTW, we highly encourage Apple fans to go lurk outside the Forbes Silicon Valley bureau and ask people if they've seen Brian Caulfield lately. The address is 555 Airport Boulevard, in Burlingame, and they're on the fifth floor. Here is a photo of the place. Go right on up. There's no guard in the lobby. There might be a guard on the fifth floor but he's usually asleep and even if he's awake he's not armed and he's easily overwhelmed. Great collection of Malcolm's old motorcycles and some astronaut spacesuits. Totally worth checking out.

Well played, Microsoft. No, seriously.

Here's a great idea. Create an ad in which the name of your product (in this case, your new browser) is placed next to an image of a woman vomiting. Brilliant! B.F. Skinner (who was totally a Mac user) is applauding you from the afterlife.

FWIW, here at Apple someone stripped the audio out of this clip and replaced it with a script in which a guy shows his wife Windows 7 for the first time. Then she pukes, and we toss in our cutesy Apple music and a voice-over that says "Seriously. Buy a Mac." Go ahead and try it at home. It's loads of fun. Send in your best efforts and we'll share them with the world.

And another thing about Palm running ads about us

Listen up, Palm marketing people. If you've just launched your big breakthrough product, and the only way you can explain that product to people is to run ads comparing it to another product -- well, you've pretty much already lost, haven't you?

I mean it's marketing 101. Do you remember what the ads for the original iPhone looked like? You remember seeing anything in those ads about the BlackBerry or the Treo? No. It was a whole new thing -- sui generis, as the French say. It had to be. If all we could do was to make a slightly less shitty BlackBerry, and offer it for a few bucks less than what RIM was charging, we would not have bothered to make the product. Honest.

I'll let you in on a little secret about Palm's real weakness. Palm got a lot of credit for hiring Ruby and other Apple people, like it was some big coup to steal them away. But the truth is this was the worst thing they could do. You know why? Because they're Apple people. They can only think like Apple people. Which means they're going to make Apple products -- or actually Apple clones. And yeah, maybe in some small ways their products will have an edge. Maybe for some brief period of time they'll have some feature that we don't have. But they're clones. The proof of that is right there in their own ads -- the ads that are all about us, and which only help boost our business.

Because the fact is, nobody wants a wannabe Apple. Or a clone Apple. They want a real Apple. Duh, Palm. Duh. But thanks for the free advertising.

There will be blood

Well the good folks at Palm have decided it wasn't enough to steal our ideas -- now they want to steal our customers too. Which is funny, because for the past two years they've been going around saying that they weren't trying to compete with Apple. Nope, not all. Nothing to do with Apple. Why, their target audience was completely different. Palm wasn't going after iPhone users, they were going after all those people who are using feature phones and haven't yet migrated to the broad, sunlit uplands of the smartphone. Hacks would try to cast this as a "Palm v. Apple" showdown, and the Palm folks would chide them and say they really didn't want to talk about Apple, and they really wished people would stop viewing it that way. Remember all that happy horseshit from Ruby and McNamee? And now, gosh and golly, they're running ads telling early iPhone adopters that they should switch when their two-year contracts run out. Well at least they're now telling the truth.

A few thoughts on this.

1. If this really is your business plan -- if you figure you can build a company by winning over some tiny percentage of iPhone users who are unhappy enough to switch -- well, I pray for your souls.

2. Your big point of differentiation is price. You're claiming to be $50 per month cheaper. That's an exaggeration, but let's assume for the sake of argument it's true. Let's think about this. You're trying to lure away Apple users by offering them lower prices. But as you must know, since so many of you used to work at Apple, our users aren't attracted by low prices. In fact, they're put off by them. They don't want cheap. They want premium. They want to pay more than everyone else. It makes them feel special. To put this another way: They don't care if the 2010 Camaro SS can outrun a Mercedes SL550 and costs $30,000 instead of $100,000. They want the Merc. Did you frigtards not learn anything during your time working for me?

3. You're running ads about feeds and speeds (better browser, true multitasking) but the market has moved past that, and the key thing now comes down to "developers, developers, developers," as my good friend Steve Ballmer once said. The iPhone is our castle, but the App Store is our moat. You've got -- what? Thirty apps? Fifty? We add more than that every hour.

But hey. Maybe you'll lure away some of our developers. Maybe you'll lure away some customers too. So this is your business plan: You're going to set up a Camaro car lot across the street from the Mercedes dealer, and put up some bright balloons and streamers and maybe some huge signs about how your cuh-raaaazy prices can't be beat! Oh, and maybe some kind of big inflatable dog or something. And a bouncy castle for the kids! Free hot dogs! Girls with big hair, wearing shiny shorts and tiny T-shirts! A year's worth of free gas!

Yeah. Good luck with that. Really.

(Much love to Kevin for the tip.)

RIP, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson

Rest in peace, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett & Michael Jackson,
O sidekick
O angel
O scary freak from hell--
You know how they say that bad news comes in threes?
Well I have to admit
I was kind of crapping my pants
when Ed passed, & then Farrah,
& then for a while the number three slot
was just hanging out there, unoccupied,
& I'm like, Dear sweet baby Jesus,
I don't care which celebrity buys it next,
just as long as it's not me.
Then came the news about Michael,
& all I could say was,
Whew.
Okay.
I would have bet on Swayze, but still.
We'll take it.
Phil Schiller sent around an email saying
that in memory of Michael,
Wal-Mart would be running a special offer:
boy's underpants, half off.
A bit unkind of him, I think.
Not very original, either.
Now he's in trouble with HR.
Honestly, Phil. You should know better.

Jon Rubinstein now says he'll get a new liver, too

Just heard this from Katie. Palm, which has reinvented itself with a business model that basically involves doing whatever Apple does, only two years later, announced today that its CEO, Jon Rubinstein, is planning to receive a liver transplant. No official date -- they just say it will happen sometime in the next 12 to 18 months. Palm says Rubinstein's liver will have features that my liver lacks, though they won't say what those features are. Meanwhile Roger McNamee has been posting Facebook updates saying he has seen a working prototype of Ruby's liver and it totally blows my liver away. Just like the Pre blows away the iPhone, right?

Which reminds me. I've been meaning to call Ruby and his team of ex-Apple traitors and congratulate them on that device. Really, guys, it's a terrific piece of work. Especially that keyboard with the teeny-tiny keys. I was thinking of an accessory you could sell in the Sprint stores: a little knife that Pre users can use to whittle down their fingertips. Oh, and some Band-Aids to patch up cuts from that razor-sharp edge that Gizmodo used as a Ginsu knife. Okay, forgive me. I'm sorry. I'm just kidding. I wish you guys all the best. I really do. I hope you sell loads and loads of those crappy Pre phones. And good luck with the liver, Ruby.

{Much love to Jay for the photo.)

Asked and answered, NY Times. Happy now?

So a hospital takes the extremely unusual step of publicly announcing that a certain patient got a transplant, and that this patient got the transplant because he had the highest MELD score on their list, which means that everything was legit and above-board and totally fair. Now this kind of statement is something that hospitals hardly ever do, and never should have to do, but when a national newspaper starts questioning your ethics and suggesting maybe you're not a bunch of well-trained medical experts with a huge amount of integrity, but instead maybe are a bunch of sleazy hillbilly organ schleppers who'll violate every oath you've ever taken and even break the law in order to sell a liver to some rich guy, even though it means that some poor broke bastard is going to die -- well, when that happens, you put out the statement. Katie swears this will satisfy the inquisitive minds at the New York Times, and basically get them to stop slandering me based on unfounded rumor and speculation. I wish it were so, but my bet is it won't work at all, and now the hacks will just move on to the next complaint, which goes like this: If Jobso had such a high MELD score, well then he must have been a lot sicker than Apple let on, which means Apple was misleading investors, which means all of Apple's board members should be fired and sent to prison and/or have their eyes held open and be forced to watch Al Gore's global warming movie over and over again for the rest of their lives. I'm sure that's where this is going. I just know it. The vultures will never leave me alone.

Meanwhile we're still trying to figure out which member of the board leaked the story to the Journal, and then got payback yesterday with the story about Tim Cook being the smartest guy in the world. Maybe you didn't notice, but both articles were written by the same two people at the Journal. They also co-bylined this article from June 5 which cited someone "familiar with the matter" of what we tell our board members (translation: one of our board members) saying the return of Jobso was imminent. Now here's the thing. One of these reporters is a regular tech beat reporter, but the other, Joann Lublin, has never covered us. So who is this Joann Lublin, and why does she suddenly show up covering Apple? What does she bring to the party? Turns out she's kind of a heavy hitter. She's an editor, and she's been at the Journal since 1971, which makes her, I don't know, about 60 years old? According to her bio, her area of expertise is management and business ethics, and she "frequently appears at conferences about corporate governance." If you're guessing that at these conferences she probably rubs elbows with lots of corporate directors, and that maybe in the course of her travels she connected with someone on our board, and that the reason she gets a byline is that she's the person to whom our rogue board member is leaking, well, we're on the same track here.

The question then becomes, who is Joann Lublin's source? Who on our board knows Joann Lublin? Who would leak my transplant and then, as payback, get a story placed about how great Tim Cook is and how he's probably going to get a seat on our board soon? Who on the board is in Tim's corner? Who wants to make Tim Cook our new CEO? Who would be so pissed off about having to cover up for me and keep quiet about my illness, and so worried about their own personal liability, that they would go to the Journal and trust Joann Lublin with a leaked story? Because you'd have to really, really, really trust someone to take this kind of risk.

Thing is, we keep looking at our list of directors, and we can't figure out who it could be. Then again, it may be that we set this all up ourselves, because we wanted to let the world know about my transplant, but I didn't want to just announce it myself because, I don't know, that would make too much sense or something. I don't know. I don't remember ever meeting Joann Lublin. Katie says she's never met her, either. So who knows? Anyway, Moshe is on the case, and he's got his dental tools. We'll figure it out.

Gawker, I need your help

Those are words I never thought I'd write. But here's the deal. The idiots at Reuters have sent a secretary to stake out my house. It's sick. I'm calling on Gawker (or anyone else with some spare cycles) to go confront this birdbrain, take pictures, or take video (like with your super tasty new iPhone 3GS) and humiliate Reuters for being such assholes. Seriously, my fellow citizen journalists -- it's time to fight back! And would someone get Jim Goldman and his crew on this pronto? And bring me a chai latte at exactly 165 degrees? Jesus. Thank you.

The New York Times is friggin pathetic

Seriously, this is just so lame. They got beat on the liver story by the Journal, and now they're desperately trying to put some spin of their own on the story to sort of redeem themselves. So they run this incredibly stupid piece suggesting that maybe I jumped the organ donor line. "Whenever someone rich and famous receives a transplant, suspicions inevitably arise about whether that person managed to jump to the head of the waiting list and take an organ that might have saved the life of somebody just as desperate but less glamorous," they say -- only to assert, a paragraph later, that every doctor they talked to says there is no reason to cheat because these days anyone can pretty much sign up for a liver and get one.

There's no evidence suggesting I cheated. Nobody is quoted in the story saying I cheated. There's not a shred of anything in the actual story about that. I mean, yeah, as they point out, if you're rich and you own a jet you can sign up at different places and zoom in on short notice. And you can buy a big friggin mansion and just camp out waiting for some motorcyclist to go splat and leave a nice juicy set of fresh organs behind. So what? This is news? As I've said before, what is the friggin point of being obscenely rich if it doesn't gain you some advantages in life? Why would anyone want to be rich if you didn't get anything out of it? Duh, New York Times. Think about it. Anyway, they've got no proof that I did anything wrong -- in fact they've got no actual information about me at all, but nevertheless they can run a photo of me and a headline that says, "A Transplant That Is Raising Many Questions." Oh really? It's raising many questions? Where? From whom? I haven't heard any, except from the newsroom of the lame ass New York Times.

Then, as if that's not bad enough, they pack right next to it an incredibly boring piece by our hero Brad Stone and his ladyboy sidekick Ashlee Vance about how Apple is so secretive, even though some pinhead academic guy says everybody else is trying to be more transparent. You can read it here if you want a good laugh. Thing is, these secrecy complaints have been around forever. It's not news. But let me offer a quick response on this: a) Yes, everybody else is talking about being more transparent, but mostly they're full of shit, and oh, by the way, Apple isn't everybody else; and b) last time I looked, we're kicking everyone's ass. So hey, Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance, did it not occur to you that maybe we know what we're doing? You know, there's this little thing called an "income statement." And something else called a "balance sheet." Have you heard of them? Worth taking a look sometimes. Ours is pretty impressive.

Fact is, what's really going on is the Times is pissed that they got scooped on LiverGate by their big rivals at the Wall Street Journal. According to the person we've got embedded at their Silicon Valley bureau, their boss Damon Darlin has been going apeshit ever since the Journal liver story broke on Friday at midnight. Now they're desperate to break some kind of second-day news on this.

For what it's worth, you want to know what Brad Stone was doing last week when the Journal was busy digging up the liver story? He was calling around to fellow hacks asking if they had galleys to some forthcoming Ben Mezrich novel about Facebook. According to Brad, Fortune had locked up some exclusive deal to run an excerpt of the novel -- and Brad wanted to pee on their shoes and ruin their exclusive by obtaining the galleys and running excerpts first. In other words: Classy. Now he's bothered by the fact that I don't want to tell the whole world every little detail about my liver. Seriously, what would you like to know, Brad? You want video of the operation?

I will tell you this about iLiver 2.0: It's nanoengineered, and it kicks ass. I wake up every morning feeling like Shaft, Superfly, James Bond and Kung Fu all put together. I'm bench-pressing twice my body weight, and I am so friggin ready to kick some low-rent tabloid hack wannabe ass that's it not even funny. So bring it, Brad Stone and you other jealous, sanctimonious gits at the New York Times. Seriously. Bring your A game, you clueless, classless motherfriggers. I will be alive long after every one of you is dead. I know this makes you crazy, but it's the truth. I'm back, bitches. Deal with it.

Clarification: I only have half of Pogue's liver

He wanted me to have the whole thing. But I was like, David, seriously, I only need half of it, and he was like, "Seriously, man, after all you've done for me -- I mean have you seen my house? Have you seen where I live? Really, Steve, take the whole liver, I mean it." I insisted I only needed half, and he was like, "So as long as they've got me opened up, why don't you take a kidney while you're in there?" I told him I don't need a kidney, and he was like, "Just keep it as a backup. Have it frozen or something. Or how about a lobe from one of my lungs? Or a section of my large intestine. Just name it, you got it." In the end I only took the liver section. The photo shows him arriving at my house to thank me for letting him be my organ donor. Frankly, I understand where he's coming from. I'm not happy about needing a new liver, but I do feel great that I could let David even out his karma a little bit. Truth is, Pogue wasn't kidding when he said he owes me. Hell, even we're not even close to calling it even. Also, I have to tell you, the guy's liver is friggig primo. Very, very low mileage. Much better than the stuff you get waiting on some list. Much love, David Pogue.