Honestly, he won’t let it go. He’s calling me over and over saying, Wait until you hear the latest, you won’t believe what they’re saying now! As if I care. Jesus. I put my iPhone 4 down on the desk and let him rant for a few minutes while I do some work, then I pick up and pretend I’ve been listening. Larry’s position is that Hurd didn’t do anything wrong. He’s like, Look, it’s not like he was drugging teenage girls and raping them while they were passed out! I’m like, Wait, is that the new hurdle CEOs have to get over? As long as you’re not feeding them roofies and raping them, it’s okay? And Larry says, Look, don’t start, you’re not like the rest of us, you have no genitals, you’re a fucking Ken doll, you can’t understand the needs that a normal man has. To which I say, Dude, I saw the pictures of Hurd’s gal-pal, and honestly, I wouldn’t tap that with your dick. Larry says then at least there’s one thing we can agree upon, but as they say, De gustibus non disputandum est, to which I said, Stop showing off with your restaurant French, everybody knows you’re a dropout just like me.

Anyway. My own paranoid conspiracy theory is that this woman was probably a Microsoft plant. Because think about it. A few months ago HP shoved a fork in Ballmer’s eye when they bought Palm and, in effect, rejected Windows. So, Ballmer waits a little while and then bam — he knocks Hurd out of the box. Maybe this all sounds crazy but trust me, the Borg has these sluts planted everywhere. We all do it, actually. They work their way in on some CEO or other top manager; they gather evidence; and then when we’re negotiating something tricky and we need something, we pull the trigger. The slut springs a blackmail attempt or, in this case, a groundless sexual harassment claim which everyone knew would fail in court but was basically just a way to embarrass Hurd and knock him out of his job.

Ballmer doesn’t try planting whores around me, because he knows it’s pointless; I don’t allow anyone to touch me. And nobody bothers planting whores around Larry, because he hits anything that moves and makes no apologies for it, and if you try to sue him he’ll get you thrown into prison. He did that to that one woman, and after that the word got out real fast among the VIP hostesses and “marketing consultants” that you should not mess with Larry, because he will cut a bitch.

And change is good. Isn’t it? This is a song from a Rocky movie, played entirely on iPads. I’ll be honest. It’s not exactly what we envisioned when we first set out to create this history-making device. But it does inspire awe. Will we someday have entire orchestras playing iPads? I believe we will. Will I go sit through their performances? Probably not. But I will honor their efforts.

So some random analyst firm that nobody has ever heard of just reported that Android outsold iPhone in the United States last quarter, and people are losing their mud saying it’s all over for Apple, this is the tipping point, it’s game over, and blah blah. We’re deploying our blog ninjas to shoot this thing down — see MG Sieg Heil of TechCrunch arguing here that Android isn’t really winning because it runs on like a thousand different phone models and fifteen hundred carriers, while we only have one; see Gruber arguing here that (a) the real news is that RIM is screwed; (b) most of Android’s success comes from Verizon; and (c) we’d be winning if the analysts counted iPads and iPod Touch units when the compared us to Android, which they should do, even though they should also count iPad as a portable computer when they’re doing computer market share because when you do that we’re like far and away the biggest computer maker in the world; and see Dan Frommer of Alley Insider saying here that sure Android is gaining share but guess what, Google doesn’t make any money on it and Apple is making more money than any other company in the history of the world, so nanny nanny boo boo.

See, what we’re doing these days is we make a list of talking points and instead of giving all of them to everyone we split them up and give everyone a different part of the list. Katie calls it the “croque-monsieur” because the effect is that all of these different spinning points melt together and cover up the news, like hot cheese oozing between delicious bread and disgusting foul ham.

And then I swoop in here and deliver all of the talking points in one nice neat basket. To recap:

1. Android is on lots of phones, we’re on one.

2. BlackBerry is getting killed by Android. So go look at BlackBerry. Seriously, go look at them. Their antennas are having problems too, just FYI.

3. Whatever problems we have can be blamed on AT&T, which is the shittiest carrier in the world.

4. You have to look at the software platform, not the hardware device. When you do that, iOS is winning.

5. We make money on phones and Google doesn’t.

But wait, there’s more. The truth is, we know Google is going to have more market share than we do. Heck, let’s just say it — they’re going to dwarf us. We don’t care. We would rather have 10 percent of a gorgeous beautiful pristine market that we can completely own and control (read: huge margins) than have 90 percent of a bucket of shit.

That’s why I say we didn’t lose the PC war with Microosoft, because frankly, we were never competing with Microsoft. Apple and Microsoft were doing two very different things. And equally frankly, even now, if we didn’t have iTunes and iPods and iPhone and iPad, even if we were only talking about the personal computer (desktops and laptops) market, I’d much rather have our business (Macs and OS X) than theirs. Honestly. This isn’t spin.

It cracks me up when people say we’re doing the same thing in mobile that we did in personal computers and how this is some colossal mistake and somehow, apparently, everybody at Apple is just so stupid or blind that we can’t see that we’re doing this all over again even though everyone else in the world can see it and how can this be happening and oh my goodness isn’t it awful?

But what would you suggest we do? License iOS to HTC and Samsung and Motorola and everyone else, and then hire a zillion support engineers to mop up every mess they make with all their Frankenstein monster hardware designs?

Friends, listen up. We know what we’re doing. We’re doing it on purpose. We don’t need to be the biggest. Is Porsche the biggest? Or Mercedes? Or BMW? No, and they don’t want to be. Neither do we.

In three years, maybe less, Android will be way bigger than us. And we’ll have the better business.

Peace.

Maybe you didn’t notice, but we released our financial results last night and blew everyone away. Now iSupply is doubling its forecast for iPad sales. Somehow, in the middle of all this good news, I seem to recall that there was some kind of press event last week … but I can’t remember what it was about. Something about the media, or about mobile phones maybe?

Yeah. It’s like that, people. The non-issue over the antenna is officially over. Dead and buried. You know why? Because money talks, and bullshit walks. I’m so excited that I’m going to treat myself to an extra mango lassi at lunch.

Suddenly now it’s all my fault that the iPhone 4 has antenna problems, which first of all, it doesn’t, and second of all, I’m not. But someone inside is leaking shit to the press and spinning the story to make it seem like the engineers wanted to do the right thing but kept getting overruled by Mean Old Steve and his groovy industrial design team.

First came the Bloomberg article saying our antenna engineers warned me and I didn’t listen to them. Now comes this piece in the Wall Street Journal saying that, basically, it’s all my fault. See this:

Steve Jobs’s insistence on strict control of Apple Inc.’s product-design process appears to have backfired with his new iPhone 4, leading the company to overrule internal concerns about antenna reception.

And this:

Apple engineers were aware of the risks associated with the new antenna design as early as a year ago, but Mr. Jobs liked the design it so much that Apple went ahead with its development, said a person familiar with the matter.

All I can tell you is that heads are going to roll on this but mine isn’t going to be one of them. No way am I going to be blamed for some shit design and crap engineering.

Meanwhile we’re working on hunting down the leaker. We’ve sealed shut all the engineering buildings, and Moshe and his team are scouring the phone logs and reading everyone’s email. More on this as it develops.

Consumer Reports calls our product defective and says they can’t recommend it. And what happens? Some hack at Business Insider actually sides with us, and says Consumer Reports is just trying to pull a publicity stunt, bashing Apple to drive traffic to its Web site.

Friends, the power of our brand is like nothing that has ever been known to man. If you could bottle our brand, it would be more powerful than kryptonite, more valuable than gold. The guys at Toyota just sit there turning green with envy. Honestly, I’m just agog.

Of course other less honest journalists are saying we need to do a recall. Like Cult of Mac and CNET.

My response is simple and direct: We will never, ever, ever do a recall. No way. The stain of a few gripers we can deal with. The stain of a recall is something that takes years — years — to overcome. In our business it would be fatal. We would never recover.

So, no. We’ll keep shipping the fucked-up phones, and we’ll continue to insist that they are the best phones in the world with the best antenna that has ever been invented for any mobile device. We’ll keep running syrupy ads showing deaf mutes waving at each other over FaceTime.

If that’s not enough, maybe we’ll do a partial fall-back and agree to give out free bumpers to people who want them, and we’ll act like this is some huge deal and a big blow to our bottom line and blah blah blah so that will buy us a month maybe.

Then we’ll rush out iPhone 5 with a new design by Christmas season. It’s basically an iPhone 4 with a rubber wrapper around the outside. We’ve got the kids in China building them already.

Meanwhile, to all concerned, remain on message: There is nothing wrong with iPhone 4. It’s the best phone in the market. Even Consumer Reports admitted that.

If anyone mentions Android, say it’s fine if you’re a hardcore computer geek but too complicated for the average user. And it has the porn on it. Gross. Plus, iPhone has the bigger GBs.

First they said the iPhone reception thing was no big deal, and we linked to this on our official in-house fanboy blog.

But then CR had problems, and now they say they can’t recommend the phone. Are you friggin kidding me? First you liked it, now you don’t? And you expect people to listen to anything you say?

We’re asking Gruber and the rest of Team Steve to hold off on bashing this for now until we can craft a really good comeback and a set of powerful talking points. We’re hoping to have it distributed by end of day today. For now we’re just going with the trusty “they’re liars,” gambit. Meanwhile, fanboys are pouring into the CR comment string and bashing the hell out of these so-called “engineers” at CR. Well done, people. Keep up the attacks.

So one of our young PR guys, whose name escapes me because I never actually learned it, was just in a meeting flipping out because he’s been reading comments on all the tech blogs all day and they’re pretty much all really nasty and negative and hating on us. Meanwhile Katie and I are just sitting there, totally Zen, drinking our smoothies and gazing out the window. The guy keeps going on about these blog commenters and finally Katie looks at me, as if to say, Should I explain? And I give her my Zen nod and she informs the guy that we don’t need to impress anyone on the tech blogs — the kind of people who post on those blogs are not our customers anyway. The people we need to worry about are soccer moms and fanboys. And this press release we put out today will take care of both of those groups perfectly. The young kid goes, Well, if I can be frank, that statement was utter bullshit, and everyone saw right through it. Katie just took a deep sigh and explained to him that sure, the blog geeks saw right through it, but once again, those freaks are all using Android anyway and we really don’t care what they think. The kid persisted so finally I cleared my throat and explained it to him myself.

I said, Young acolyte, have you ever heard of a novel called Anatomy of a Murder? If not, you should, because (a) it’s a good read, and (b) it contains one of the best pieces of advice about selling or marketing that you will ever get anywhere. The deal is this. An army guy gets arrested for murdering an innkeeper; he says the innkeeper raped his wife. The main character is the lawyer who defends the killer and succeeds in getting him acquitted. At one point he tells the defendant (or maybe it’s in the narration to the reader, I can’t remember) that the defendant is a guy that the jury is going to like. They want to acquit him. They’re looking for any reason, no matter how implausible, to find him not guilty. So all the defense has to do is give the jury an excuse to do what they all already want to do, which is acquit. It can be utter horseshit, completely ridiculous, and it won’t matter. The jury is just looking for permission to acquit the guy.

So it is with us and the fanboys. They want to buy our products. They just don’t want to lose face. Like that jury, they want to acquit us. All we need to do is throw them something they can latch on to so they can say, See? Apple recognized the problem and fixed it right away, what an awesome company, always looking out for customers, blah blah. So, as far as the Apple faithful are concerned, we’re done and done.

The soccer moms are slightly different. They’re not paying attention to any of this shit at all, and have just maybe kinda vaguely heard something from someone somewhere that there was some problem with the antenna. They don’t know what it is, exactly, or how it all works, and they don’t want to know, because they’re busy running to yoga class and picking up the kids after school and they’d really like to get that new iPhone 4 because it’s like really good or whatever and one of the other moms got it and she said it’s cool but supposedly there’s something with the antenna but she hasn’t experienced it. All we need to do for them is do something, anything, so that words gets around that yes there was some kind of problem but Apple did something, anything, and now everything is okay.

And if you don’t believe that there are consumers this clueless, trust me — I was visiting Apple stores when the iPad shipped (in disguise, of course) and I saw, with my own eyes, and heard, with my own ears, a woman say to a salestard, “Why does this one cost more than this one?” And the salestard had to explain that one had more gigabytes which meant it could store more movies and music. Then the woman said, “And do I need to get a contract with AT&T?” This was the first week of product shipment, when we were only shipping WiFi-only devices. Ahem. And yes, despite the fact that she had obviously done zero homework, and had likely never heard of any of these tech blogs that were foaming at the mouth non-stop for months about every tiny detail of the iPad — yes, despite her ignorance, she walked out with an iPad. The expensive one.

And yes, Virginia, there really are loads and loads of these technotarded people, and you know what? They are by far our best and biggest customers. Our whole business model is based on selling to them.

So take that, blog commenters. You can debate and argue 24-7 on this external antenna and the Anandtech investigation and how many dBs of attenuation you can get when you wrap an iPhone 4 in latex and shove it halfway up your butts. Have fun! Go wild! Knock yourselves out. But by Tuesday, when all the regular folks come back from the long weekend of cookouts and hanging out on the beach, this non-issue will have been eliminated by our non-repair, just wait and see.

Meanwhile, peace out and namaste. I honor the place where our bullshit and your need to believe in us become one.

Gizmodo has started a petition demanding free bumpers. I will feel so much better when those guys are all in prison, honestly.