Sunday, January 20, 2008

Jobs: China Mobile talks aren’t off, because they were never on


In a Macworld post-keynote interview with CNBC yesterday, Steve Jobs was pimping the iPhone’s numbers since launch (over four million sold — a number Wall Street didn’t like, but what can you do?) between rants about the MacBook Air’s qualities and, at some point, got on the topic of bringing the iPhone to China. The popular rumor over the last couple months has been that Apple had been working with China Mobile on making a launch happen but that talks eventually broke down. Here, Steve says that’s simply not the case; a single rep from China Mobile visited the Apple campus all of once, and that’s it. He’d love to bring the iPhone to the Far East (or so he says), but the fact remains that there aren’t any heated discussions going on with the major players. At least, that’s what Steve claims — and as we all know, CEO reality can be very, very different from real reality.