Apple: Steve Jobs 'It's Just a Phone' E-Mail a Hoax

​Perturbed owners of the class action lawsuit-inducing iPhone 4 were probably none too pleased to see a purported interchange between Apple's Steve Jobs and an irate iPhone owner in which the CEO concluded by telling the man "Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone. Not worth it."

Hey, at least he didn't say "I'm Steve Jobs and you're not." But it turns out that apparently wouldn't have been an accurate statement, because the writer of the e-mails apparently wasn't Steve Jobs. Apple is now saying that the e-mail interchange -- which was first published on the blog Boy Genius Report and subsequently linked to by dozens of other sites -- is a hoax. 

Fortune is reporting that a "top Apple spokesman" denied that Jobs was in any way involved in the caustic e-mail exchange. Perhaps more damningly, the site AppleInsider noted that it had earlier been hit up for money in order to publish that very article.

That the story had been shopped around prior to its publication was not mentioned on Boy Genius Report. SF Weekly has left messages for the site's editors querying whether they paid for this article and if they knew it had been shopped around the Internet at the time they published it. 

It also warrants mentioning that on Boy Genius Report -- and many of the sites linking to it -- there was no language indicating that the e-mails might have been written by anyone other than the genuine Steve Jobs (While it's sometimes a cop out, there's a reason journalists use terms such as "reportedly" and "allegedly").

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