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Apple cult leader emails outside world

11 words from the Messiah's Jesus phone

Apple cult leader Steve Jobs has communicated with the outside world.

As revealed by Crunchgear, Jobs recently sent an 11-word email to a longtime Mac developer who had come groveling to the cult leader after being threatened by a band of Apple lawyers.

John Devor is the CEO of The Little App Factory, a tiny shareware outfit that offers a Mac application known as iPodRip. The tool has provided iPod disaster recovery since 2003, roping in roughly six millions users, but in recent weeks, the Apple legal police suddenly decided it was time the app had a new name.

But rather than obeying the Jobsian minions, Devor took the audacious step of sending an appeal for leniency straight to the cult leader:

Dear Mr. Jobs,

My name is John Devor and I’m the co-owner of a small Mac shareware company named The Little App Factory and a long-term Apple customer and shareholder. I doubt you’re aware but we recently received a letter from a law firm working on Apple’s behalf instructing us that we had violated several of Apple’s trademarks in our application iPodRip and asking us to cease using the name and Apple trademarks in our icons.

We have been distributing iPodRip since 2003 with the aim of providing a method to recover music, movies and photos from iPods and iPhones in the event of a serious hardware failure on their Mac which leads to data loss. Our goal has been to provide the highest quality product coupled with the highest quality service in a bid to resolve some of the angst that is generated by such an ordeal; service befitting of an Apple product. In this department we think we have succeeded as we have approximately 6 million customers, many Apple employees, music artists and other notable people in society. In fact I’d argue that our customer service is the best of all competing applications in our niche as many of them are scams and frauds that leave Apple customers with a terrible taste in their collective mouths. We fear very much that tens of thousands of Apple customers looking to recover their own music and having heard of our product via word-of-mouth or otherwise, will instead find a product produced by one of our competitors, and will wind up the victim of a scam (one closely-named competitor charges a hidden monthly fee, for instance).

It is quite obvious that we mean Apple no harm with the use of the name iPodRip, or of the inclusion of trademarked items in our icons, and in fact I believe that we have been providing an excellent secondary service to Apple customers that has potentially caused you many repeat clients. In fact, we are quite aware that Apple support and store staff have recommended our software on numerous occasions as far back as 2004 so we have felt that we were doing something right!

With this in mind, we are in desperate need of some assistance and we beseech you to help us to protect our product and our shareware company, both of which we have put thousands upon thousands of hours of work into. Our company goal is to create Mac software of the highest quality with the best user experience possible. I myself dropped out of school recently to pursue a path in the Mac software industry, and you yourself have been a consistent inspiration for me.

If there is anything at all you can do with regards to this matter, we would be most grateful.

Best,

John Devor

And the leader deigned to respond:

Change your apps name. Not that big of a deal.

Steve

Sent from my iPhone

We suspect that cult followers everywhere will soon be dropping their own apostrophes.

AppleInsider reports this is the first time the leader has communicated with the outside world since a 2008 email told a MacBook user that "Actually, all of the new HD camcorders of the past few years use USB 2." ®

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