Steve Jobs email: ‘Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone. Not worth it.’
[Via MacDailyNews]
The iPhone 4 antenna issue is real. Th
The leaked Apple troubleshooting documents and job posting confirms what a lot of iPhone 4 owners are stating,” Matt Burns writes for TechCrunch. “Worse yet, a lot of owners are finding that bumpers — DIY or official ones — don’t totally solve the problem.”
“But Steve Jobs has some advice, ‘Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone. Not worth it,'” Burns writes. “That’s what he supposedly emailed to one very irate iPhone 4 owner who, along with a few friends, are finding the iPhone 4 has major problems. Steve first tells the owner to calm down, then blames his problems on signal strength, and then finally states ‘[Apple] is working on it.'”
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This sounds pretty callous and not at all Apple-like. Jobs telling someone to not be upset when a $200 device does not work as advertised. MacDailyNews does have some hesitancy about the veracity of the exchange:
Are these emails really coming from Steve Jobs? The Steve Jobs? If so, Jobs’ attitude is not the attitude that made Apple great once and then great again. If blasé bullshit is all we have to look forward to, prepare to be scotch-taping all of your future Apple products to get them to work properly, too.
As Burns stated so clearly, “It’s really not too much to ask that a basic function like placing a phone call works reliably.”
“Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone. Not worth it.” If Jobs really wrote that… just wow. To us, that sounds a lot less like advice to a justifiably upset customer (who, by the way, most likely can’t just retire on a whim, regardless of how much they might like to relax) and a lot more like something Jobs has lately been telling himself just before falling asleep at night.
Dear Steve, Apple customers should be getting satisfied beyond expectation, not retirement advice.
I had some also since the writer claimed to be a longtime fan of Apple but spelled it MAC. I know of absolutely no longtime fan who spells it that way but I do know a lot of Windows fans who do.
First, it appears that Steve Jobs never wrote “‘Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone. Not worth it.” The emailer, Tom, apparently wrote those. I wonder if he wrote any of the other replies?
Second, it seems that the emails are a fake as discussed by several Apple sources. Engadget reported later:
Apple PR says recent Steve Jobs emails are fake
[Via Engadget]
If you’ve been anywhere near the internet in the past few hours, you’ve undoubtedly heard about a Steve Jobs email conversation in which he told an angry iPhone customer to “calm down” and that the iPhone 4 was “just a phone.” That email chain, which was published on Boy Genius Report earlier, was also reportedly shopped to AppleInsider a few days ago — for a price. Well, now Fortune is reporting that they’ve been told by a “a top Apple spokesman” that the emails are fake, and the exchange never happened. Of course, emails are notoriously easy to fake, and Apple has not been in the habit of commenting on its CEO’s online wanderings, so our ears pricked up when we saw this article. We’ve reached out to Apple and they have independently confirmed to us that the conversation is indeed a hoax. So as usual, take all of these Jobs-uncensored dialogues with a healthy grain of salt.
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Makes one wonder how much Boy Genius Report paid. Money well-spent for all the hits it probably got. Gossip always makes so much more money than factual presentations.
A Man With A Ph.D. 