Apple: Jobs' "Retire, Relax, Enjoy your family" exchange is fake | Hacker News Reader

Apple: Jobs' "Retire, Relax, Enjoy your family" exchange is fake

loopinsight.com

18 pointsbbatsell12 comments

Boy Genius Report updated the post with full (email) headers. For now it looks like they're sticking with the story:

http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/07/01/exclusive-conversa...

Except that they posted the headers of an e-mail from "Tom" to Jobs, so they necessarily show absolutely no Apple-related mail servers. (And that's, of course, on top of the fact that headers are incredibly easily faked.)

Jason Burford exists: http://burfordadvertising.com/Burford_Advertising/Jason_Burf...

Edit. Oh this is odd. There's a second domain in the email path:

http://jasonburford.com/Jason_Burford/Jason_Burford.html

Yep. Plus the fact that Apple went out of their way to deny the exchange (something they've never done before with I-emailed-Steve stories), suggests that this is fake.

But BGR is sticking with it for now.

The original blog and the information in the e-mail headers show that the customer said the quote, not Steve Jobs. The original article was incorrect.

Additionally, Daniel Eran Dilger* claims the purported recipient of the e-mail tried to sell him the e-mail exchange two days prior, raising the question of whether BGR money changed hands.

*I take everything he writes under his own name and any and all pseudonyms with a large grain of salt, but it's worth noting.

Since Steve Jobs is known for replying to emails, people can potentially try to manipulate Apple's image like that guy did. It could hurt the reputation of the company; I wonder why Jobs does that (and his emails usually don't have much content anyway).

I smelled a rat because the emails "to" Jobs were borderline psycho, with all those misspellings and bad sentences. I wrote it off as possibly someone whose first language wasn't English. Actually, we were all being laughed at by a prankster.

Such is the danger of letting the CEO respond to email, especially given his tendency for off-the-cuff remarks

Where is the source for THIS claim?

"Well, now Fortune is reporting that they've been told by a "a top Apple spokesman" that the emails are fake, and the exchange never happened. Of course, emails are notoriously easy to fake, and Apple has not been in the habit of commenting on its CEO's online wanderings, so our ears pricked up when we saw this article. We've reached out to Apple and they have independently confirmed to us that the conversation is indeed a hoax."

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/01/apple-pr-says-recent-stev...

It's hard to imagine anybody having the gumption to talk to Steve Jobs like that.

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