“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.’”
“Remember, he might be the best person to attest to enjoying family time and not sweating the little things after surviving a rare form of pancreatic cancer and a liver transplant,” Burns writes. “If Steve Jobs isn’t worried about it, then maybe you shouldn’t be either. Then again, $200 is a lot of money for some of Apple’s customers, which is something billionaire Jobs might have [forgotten]. It’s really not too much to ask that a basic function like placing a phone call works reliably.”
UPDATE: 9:50pm EDT: According to Apple, the email purported to be from Steve Jobs was a fake. More info: Apple: CEO Jobs email a fake; did not tell customer ‘calm down,’ ‘retire,’ ‘it’s just a phone’ – July 01, 2010
The email exchange can be found on Boy Genius Report here.
MacDailyNews Take: Are these emails really coming from Steve Jobs?
UPDATE: 9:50pm EDT: We now know the answer is, thankfully, an emphatic “No.” The email purported to be from Steve Jobs was a fake.
Accordingly, we have removed the “STEVIE SAY RELAX” image and struck through the majority of our Take below. Even though we questioned the whether the email was really from him and based our take on the assumption that it was, we also publicly apologize to Apple CEO Steve Jobs while imploring him to please stop using email to communicate with customers and instead use an official Apple blog so everyone can trust that we are actually reading his words.
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.
So, this will naturally prompt the media to question once more: “Is Jobs tired, bored, about to retire, and/or dying?” We await Connie The Vulture’s piece with bated breath (read with dripping sarcasm).
All that said, once again: The iPhone 4 is the best smartphone/pocket computer we’ve ever used. We wouldn’t give our units up even if they had to held with salad tongs.
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