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Jobs to iPad skeptic: 'Are you nuts?'

Euro launch conspiracy theory quashed

A European iPad fancier emailed Steve Jobs that he feared a nefarious plot was behind the delay of his rendezvous with Apple's "magical and revolutionary" device.

Jobs' reponse: "Are you nuts?"

And unlike his other indignant, off-the-cuff email outbursts, this time Jobs may be right.

Swiss business consultant Paul Shadwell shared his Jobsian email exchange in a post to his personal blog. In his message to Jobs, Shadwell expressed his disappointment with the delay, bemoaned what he characterized as "misinformation or no information at all" coming from Apple, and accused Jobs of "deliberately pulling the wool over the rest of the worlds eyes."

Jobs' response:

"deliberately pulling the wool over the rest of the worlds eyes"

Are you nuts? We are doing the best we can. We need enough units to have a responsible and great launch.

While we have in the past suggested to Apple's legal team that they confiscate Jobs' iPhone - or at least disable its email-sending capabilities - this time Steve's dudgeon is understandable, if not delicately phrased.

If the iPad were to be made available in Europe in late April as originally planned rather than being delayed until late May, Jobs & Co. would be raking in a potentional torrent of euros and pounds sterling from a half-billion potential EU customers for an extra month.

From a Cupertinian perspective, what's not to like about that? As The Reg has commented many a time, Steve Jobs has never met a revenue stream he didn't embrace.

We believe that there simply aren't enough iPads to go around - whether that's because of the li'l fellow's surprising popularity in the US, as Apple has claimed, or whether it's because manufacturing problems are choking the delivery chain. Or both. And parsing out an insufficient supply would be both a logistical and customer-satisfaction nightmare.

But if Steve could be banking those pounds and euros - and, for that matter, yen, lira, rands, rubles, and yuan - for an extra month, he'd most certainly be doing so.

To think otherwise would be nuts. ®

Thanks to AppleInsider for tipping us about Shadwell's persecution complex.

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