That was a T-Shirt design by Fake Steve Jobs, (AKA Dan Lyons). I’m a great fan of his, and the past week he stole Christmas. Well, Christmas headlines at least, when he went out of character to show just how Apple isn’t always the goody two shoes company most fans take it for.

Apple recently paid Think Secret (an old Apple rumour site) good money to shut up and shut down, nobody much cared because (to quote RoughlyDrafted magazine) "ThinkSecret’s RSS feed has served as essentially a time delayed version of AppleInsider". Lyons, a wouldbe full time fiction author, only in journalism for the money, thought this would be a prime opportunity for him to jump out of character, and write a little drama for himself. Apple was going to shut him down.

Each of these were told as out of character, and fooled many news sites, or at least were covered, here are the posts in order of posting.

I’m weighing an offer from Apple

So now Apple is all pissed off

First Carrot, Now Stick

God bless you for your support and later…

I’m feeling a little bit better now 

Breakfast with an Apple Lawyer

Still the finest Christmas song ever

The first six of these are the story, and it’s refreshing to see someone take an entirely different point of view on the crisis, away from the usual comedy of FSJ, a heart tugging tale reminding us all that Apple, lawyers and Steve Jobs, can be pure evil sometimes too.

Dan Lyons, obviously as architect of the tale, comes out heroic, blasting Apple for using Ghandi when shutting down people’s freedom to speak, just isn’t what Ghandi would do.

Still it’s worth a read, and anything that caused the real Steve Jobs to email back to whining users, and me to make an image mocking it, has got to be worth it, right?

Unfortunately, as Dan wrote in his latest post. It’s not really a joke, is it?

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