Same trick: We feed you loads of bogus info, and sure enough, you print it on your blog as you make a bunch of big predictions. To recap: iPod Touch will get a camera; Jobso will not make an appearance; FM tuner in the Nano “sounds slightly odd to me.” But fear not — despite this one and your other recent bad call, the clued-in dudes at Alley Insider will still call you “Apple God Gruber,” when they republish your incorrect predictions. So, um, that’s pretty cool. And hey, to the rest of you idiots? Have you not figured out yet that there is no point — I mean no fucking point at all — in trying to guess what we’re going to announce, ever?

No, it’s not that I secretly despise every last one of you and wouldn’t cross the street to pee on you if you were on fire — though that is, in fact, true. What I want to tell you is that, regarding all this speculation about Beatles, and Yoko, and iPods with cameras and tablet computers with laser beams — enough already. Okay? The bottom line is, you’ll get what we give you, and you’ll like it. No, wait. You’ll love it. You’ll rave about it. We straight on that? Okay, peace. I’m going to go throw a bottle of water at someone.

While you’re waiting for the childlike sense of wonder to begin, here’s something you can ponder:

That’s what he said, back in 2001. The full quote was, “I just want you to know that I’ve never had another job other than writing about the Mac — except for the New York Times thing that I’m currently doing — and I just want to thank you for 15 years of my career.” I told him, “Well, we’re ready to provide you with 15 more years of writing.” And you know what? We’re happy to have kept up our end of the bargain, and frankly we’re sick of the crap that this fine young man has had to put up with over this ginned-up “conflict of interest” issue. It’s been around for years, and now he’s even being harassed by the editors at the New York Times, who frankly should be thanking their lucky stars to have David even bother to write for their lousy rag.

For a little background on this whole hooha over David’s books, go here. To sum up, the bitter, twisted freaks and haters have been drumming up this FUD for years, even though, as David points out, most of his books have nothing to do with Apple, and all you have to do is look at the screen shot above, or at this page and this page and this page and this page on the O’Reilly site to see what he’s talking about. Why, there are hardly any Apple-related books in his catalog! Or go to David Pogue’s own Web site and look at the books advertised down the right-hand column. Or check out the page where he sells his older books at half price. Does this look like a guy who does a lot of Apple-related manual writing? Come on.

Yes, David did once thank me for providing him 15 years of steady and lucrative work — the only real job he’s ever had. But come on. All the hacks say stuff like that when they’re trying to butter you up. You should hear the way little Jim Goldman of CNBC blows sunshine up my ass before we go on air for our completely unscripted and unrehearsed “news interviews.” Jimmy G. makes Pogue look like an amateur, believe me.

Finally, here is David singing a love song for me at Macworld last January (skip to 3:00 in the video) and once again, before anyone takes this out of context, please just remember that this is no indication of any kind of bias or fondness or anything on David’s part. David sings songs like this for everybody. Seriously, he does. Mwah. Love you too, David.

So the fecal matter hit the spinning blades for our good friend and loyal fanboy David Pogue (in photo above, pleasuring himself with a MacBook) this week. Today, Clark Hoyt, the “public editor” at the Times, published a piece about Pogue that basically says yeah, Pogue reviews Apple products and also writes “missing manuals” for Apple products; and yeah, this is a conflict of interest; and yeah, all of his editors are aware of this and don’t quite like it; and, so, well, um, no problem! You might recognize this defense — it’s the same one we used with the feds when they were snooping around about options backdating. Yes, it happened on my watch. Yes, the culpable parties all said that I instructed them to do what they did. Therefore, no harm no foul.

Well, we got lucky on this one. We loaned David some of our lawyers to deal with the evil fuckers at the Times. Meanwhile, Al Gore put in a call to Arthur Sulzberger, and let him know that we were really concerned about this whole situation and wanted to help in any way we could, and oh, by the way, we know how tough things are financially right now and hope you are doing okay and we want you to know we love the Times and would be lost without it and we’re so there for you, dear old friend. Our lawyers came back from the first phone call saying that the Times didn’t want to get rid of David — the paper was just desperately looking for a way to keep him on while saving face. After a few days of some tricky negotiations we got Pogue off with nothing more than a requirement that he publish a little “statement of ethics.” Ha!

The coolest thing is that Mr. Big Smartypants Clark Hoyt didn’t seem to even notice the real issue here, which isn’t simply that Pogue makes millions on Apple manuals while also reviewing our products. It’s that in this most recent case, with Snow Leopard, Pogue raved about the product and called it “Apple’s sleek upgrade,” even though he later admitted to VentureBeat that Snow Leopard was causing him to experience seriously bad issues (ie crashes, loss of data) with Photoshop and Microsoft Word. Oh, and his printer had crapped out. I have to tell you, when we saw that VentureBeat item, we all figured our pal was dead meat. Photoshop is crashing every 5 or 10 minutes? Word just blanks out? And you just failed to mention this in your Times review? (Okay, yeah, you mentioned something about “frustrating glitches” with Photoshop and Word, but left out specifics. Ahem.) In fact, instead, you told people to go out and buy the product? And now the Times reviewer is on record recommending a product that others are calling a Vista-style disaster? Well, luckily guys like Clark Hoyt and the other editors at the Times don’t read blogs, so they never saw that VentureBeat item, and hey, we weren’t going to do their jobs for them, right? (One note: Please, whatever you do, do NOT post a link to this blog item to the Times comment section, or send a link to Hoyt. Bokay?)

Anyway, we salute David Pogue. We are massively relieved that readers of the New York Times will not be deprived of his expertise. Katie says a “Lifetime Achievement Award” might be in order, and I agree. So we’ll see what we can do.

Will we see a negative story in the Sunday New York Times business section tomorrow morning? We would not be surprised. Pogue will try to stop it, of course, especially since he raved about Snowy and called it “Apple’s sleek upgrade” then turned around and admitted to VentureBeat that with sleek new Snowy, which he’d just recommended to all of the readers of the New York Times, Photoshop “crashes every 5-10 minutes–just exits and loses all changes,” and “Word also exits abruptly from time to time. Also I saw a couple of bizarre cosmetic glitches (empty white rectangle on the screen).” Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, um, er … yeah.

Anyway, the guys on the news side at the Times are ashamed of Pogue and embarrassed by him. So they’ll try to redeem themselves by doing a “Does Snowy = Vista?” piece. They’ll weasel out and put a question mark in the headline, and they’ll tell us that they’re not asserting that Snowy does in fact = Vista, they’re just covering what other people are saying, and they’ll get Guy Kawasaki or Tim Bajarin or Rob Enderle to ask, rhetorically, whether this could be the “black eye” that finally interrupts Apple’s incredible string of successful hit products. The Borg won’t comment on the record, but they’ll definitely put some folks on the phone who will chortle on background and point out all the “problems” with Snowy.

To all of which I say, Fair enough. This is life in the big leagues. Don’t hate the playa and all that. What George Lucas was saying last night was that this could all be good for us, just as, he argues, Vista was good for the Borg. Instead of being big and scary, suddenly the Borg seemed just stupid and hapless, something you could laugh at and make fun of. George was like, I’d almost believe they fucked up Vista on purpose, you know? And I was like, Please, dude, they’re not that clever, have you ever met Ballmer in person? Then he said, Yeah, you’re right, and we both had a good laugh.

Anyway, Lucas says we should play this to our advantage. We’ve got the FCC ganging up on us over Google Voice, and we’ve got a zillion shitty developers bitching about the way we run our App Store, and in a larger sense we’ve got all sorts of Borg-like fearmongering going on about how we’re too powerful in smart phones and music players and we’re a monopoly and no one can stop us. Everywhere you look people are calling us “the new Microsoft” — like Henry Blodget at Alley Insider who repeated that claim this week.

To sum up: Have faith. We know what we’re doing. Snow Leopard does not have any problems. That is all just anti-Apple propaganda being created by the Borg and spread by Suppressive Persons. However, if Snow Pussy does have problems, they will only help us. Even Katie admits that we could use a bit of a black eye right now to relieve some of the pressure that’s being put on us. There will be more of this crap before it’s over. So fasten your seatbelts, and cover your eyes and ears, don’t read any newspapers, and just hang in there. If you find yourself being exposed to anti-Apple propaganda, just go to your Zen place and start chanting. If the Suppressive Persons continue to harass you, just follow the example of George, our UK marketing director (in photo), and get right back in that asshole SP’s face and start shouting, “Vista sucks! Vista sucks! You’re stuck in an incident! You are insane! You need to destimulate!” and drown them out.

For now, it may be best not to travel alone. If you must go outside, try to bring a fellow fanboy with you. If you still start to feel weak, download some new apps for your GodPhone. That should help. Also, spend some time looking at your photos of me. Best of all, come to San Francisco this Wednesday, or at least tune in to our event. We’ll have shiny new objects which will restore your sense of childlike wonder. I promise you will be dazzled and re-hypnotized. Until then, peace out.

 

Was having dinner with George Lucas last night and he made a really interesting point about Apple and all our current headaches. Goes like this. I’m sure you remember the scene in Ep. V where Han and Leia escape the bad guys by flying into an asteroid field. It’s a pretty common movie plot — they use a version of it (mine field) in Galaxy Quest too. Gist is, sometimes you have a-holes pestering you, and you’re taking all kinds of crap, and the only way to get through it is to fly through a friggin mine field or asteroid field and get bruised up a bit, but trust that it will hurt them more than it hurts you.

Which is a long way of saying that this is where we stand right now at Apple, and in a perverse way it’s a good thing for us, because keep in mind: this only happens to companies that are winning. People get scared when a company starts doing too well. They want to see you humbled a bit. They want to see you take a few shots. They want someone (the government, your rivals, whatever) to remind you (and reassure them) that you aren’t totally completely all-powerful. The Borg had their time in the asteroid field back in the 1990s, courtesy of the DOJ. At first they didn’t get it, and they played it all wrong, getting all huffy and fighting it. But then they realized what was going on, and their response became the textbook for how to handle this stuff. You go all humble. You screw up on a few things, and stumble a bit. You remind people that you’re human.

It’s like the Jesus narrative: first you amaze everyone, you do some miracles, raise a few people from the dead; but then everybody starts to hate you for being so cool, and they send you to stand before Pontius Pilate and get whipped in public and stagger around with a cross on your back and even die (sort of). They want to see you bleed. They want to see you get hurt. So fine. You do it. But if you smart you play this the way Jesus played it, or the way Obi-Wan plays it with Darth Vader: you let the a-holes strike you down, because you know that once they do, you’ll become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. (Don’t know if you’ve ever met Lucas, but if so you’ll know that he sees everything through the lens of Star Wars. He loves to talk about the Jesus myth and Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey; but he also goes on and on about the three later Star Wars films, ie the shitty ones, which he regards as the equivalent of the Bible and believes will one day be studied as important cultural artifacts. But I digress.)

Anyway, at Apple we’re hitting asteroids now, like this piece where a guy says he spent thousands upgrading his Apple equipment and it all looks just like the old stuff, isn’t really any faster or better except in some subtle ways which he, of course, is totally aware of and can appreciate because he’s fully hypnotized so totally fucking smart and techie and Apple-insidery, but he worries that regular muggles won’t notice any difference and will need more pizzazz to keep them happy. And this piece where a longtime Apple fanboy is foaming at the mouth because he installed Snow Pussy on five machines and it lobotomized every single one of them. Says he: “Don’t wag your finger at people like me for pointing out shit that shipped empirically broken.” Others say Snowy is blowing up their SuperDrives.

Some people are even starting to use the “V word” — Vista — about Snow Pussy, like this jackass at CNET. Which wouldn’t matter, except now that meme has been picked up by the Christian Science Monitor, which runs a question headline that asks, “Will Snow Leopard be Apple’s Windows Vista?”

(Katie says there are two reasons why hacks phrase headlines as questions. One is, they know that whatever they’re asking isn’t true — ie, their article will basically answer their own question with a resounding “No” — but it’s so inflammatory that they can’t resist using it and getting the traffic. Or, this is what they secretly believe, but they’re too pussy to assert it as a statement, so they weasel out and write it as a question.)

We don’t really worry about the Christian Science Monitor, but the risk is that the meme might now get picked up by newspapers whose owners are not superstitious freaks who refuse to take medicine or have surgery. In other words, the Monitor may act as a bridge that allows the meme to travel, like a virus, up out of the cesspool of blogs and trade rags and into the mainstream media.

NEXT POST: What to expect next, and how to prevent being infected by Suppressive Persons and anti-Apple propaganda.

This angry black man put out a video last fall threatening my life, and I have to tell you, it kind of scared me. He even has a Web site called “I want to smack Steve Jobs in the face.” Eek. Note the part in the video (about 2:30) where he makes an outright threat to do my physical harm, and warns me that he knows people who know people who know me, and that one day, when I’m least expecting it, he’s going to put down his box of donuts and leap out from behind a tree like some kind of hippo ninja and do me bodily harm. Katie’s like, What’s he gonna do? Sweat on you? Gross.

Anyway, Moshe insisted we take it seriously. So we reported this idiot to the feds. And we got to work on MMS. Just a reminder: we’ll have MMS active on Sept. 25. So step the fuck off, angry black man. Bokay? Because I have some friggin moves of my own, and you do not want to see me use them on you. I mean that.

PS– I do like some of your other videos. Like this one about Sarah Palin. And the one about how you want to date Megan Fox. I promise we’ll start running your stuff in the sidebar.

My friend T-Pain has put Auto-Tunes on the iPhone. Honestly, Katie and I can’t stop playing with this thing. Just being able to say “drank” instead of “drink” is so, well, liberating. Truly a dent in the universe. Boom. You can find it in the iTunes store here.

So the hacks are all up in arms about some blogger’s claim that when you upgrade to Snow Leopard we downgrade your version of the Adobe Flash player. Now stories are popping up all over, like here on PC World and here on ZDnet and here on Gizmodo and here on eWeek and — well, you get the idea. We’re getting so many calls on this, and there’s so much bad information flying around that Katie (above) has taken the extraordinary step of taking time away from other more pressing duties to work up an official statement, which we are distributing here.

Goes like this: “Your information is incorrect. What you are saying is not true. You know not whereof you speak. No, we will not tell you which part of what you said is not true. Your statement is not true. Snow Leopard is the most advanced operating system on the planet, and we are very happy with the robust reception that it is getting in the marketplace.”

Got that? Please also keep in mind that no other company in the world would ever be this accommodating when it comes to dealing with baseless rumors and speculation. Now leave us alone so we can get back to work, and stop trying to ruin everyone’s sense of childlike wonder. Okay? The negativity is really upsetting. Thank you.