'No reception issues' on iPhone 4: Steve Jobs

The Daily Mail apparently saw a Tweet from Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and rushed out a story about an iPhone 4 recall. Unfortunately, they didn't realize it was a parody Twitter account until it was too late. Really, how could they have believed it, anyway? After all, as Apple CEO Steve Jobs emailed a customer, "There are no reception issues." More on that later.


The Daily Mail story (since taken down) appeared as above (without the X; we wanted to make sure no HH readers saw it and mistook it for real news). You can still see evidence (at least at the time of this writing) if you Google the purported quote from the Apple CEO:

We may have to recall the new iPhone. This, I did not expect.

A little down the page of results, a pair of Daily Mail stories pop up (along with the Tweet itself, above it). However, clicking the Daily Mail links result only in:

The page you have requested does not exist or is no longer available.

Well, apparently they are red-faced, but plenty of sites picked up on the Daily Mail story and posted it themselves, so at least they are not alone.

The problem is that the Tweet in question, leads to a Steve Jobs parody Twitter account. Whoops.

It's amazing that the Daily Mail fell for this, as there's no way that Jobs would Tweet something like this. It's not his style. On this other hand, this is his style. A MacRumors forum member emailed him about the potential for free bumper cases while complaining about the reception issues, to which Jobs replied:

There are no reception issues. Stay Tuned.

"There are no reception issues" is, of course difficult to believe when it's clear, from videos, that there is. "There are no reception issues we can't fix with software" is hard to believe also, when antenna experts reportedly chime in with opinions on actual issues with the design of the antenna system.

"There are no reception issues we can't fix with bumpers," now that is easy to believe. We'll see when the rumored iOS 4.0.1 release comes out.