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Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos announced a new version of the Kindle designed to compete with an array of tablet computers being released at an announcement held at the company’s Seattle headquarters, high above the city. Dubbed the Krampus, the device will feature 16 GB of built-in memory, a high-resolution LCD screen, and random painful electric shocks.
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com and the world’s only known giraffe billionaire, runs the company from what’s known locally as “Lex Luthor’s Secret Lair on the Hill.” “Technically, I bought it from The Legion of Cobras, not Lex Luthor, but it was his first,” Bezos told assembled reporters. “And it’s hardly secret! Brrraaaaaahhaaa haaaaaa!”
Reporters were invited into a large auditorium in a previously undisclosed cavern 20 stories below the parking garage. After signing an NDA, journalists were shackled and chained.
Bezos was visibly excited about the new offering. “Behold! My iSlate killer!” he said, whipping a cloth from a small computing device. When an AP reporter told Bezos that the iSlate was just part of a domain name that Apple had likely registered in anticipation of possible names, and that Apple never names things as awkwardly as the iSlate or the Kindle, Bezos grew enraged, and shot rays of pure energy from his fingers. The AP reporter and several others in his vicinity were broken down into a pile of aromatic hydrocarbons.
“You fool! Don’t you think I know that!” Bezos screamed and cackled. Sort of a braying screaming cackle. It’s hard to describe, and reporters found that what with the shackles preventing notes and restricting circulation, that it became increasingly difficult to write dispassionately and descriptively.
“My spies — AppleInsider, MacNN, Gizmodo, Engadget, and John C. Welch — have revealed all the details of the new tablet that that nincompoop Steve Jobs will announce in two weeks. But I have the upper hand! Haw haw haaaaaa haw haw!”
Bezos demonstrated the featureset of the Krampus on unwilling press and analysts. “The high-contrast screen allows you to view horrific videos even when placed inches from your eyelids, forced open by clamps,” Bezos explained.
The potential market interest in screen-only devices that could be ebook readers as well as general-purpose computers has recently dimmed sales potential of the Kindle, leading to subterranean development efforts.
“My spies have been unable to penetrate 1 Infinite Loop, which is surrounded by an ionized causal nexus,” Bezos explained, while casually snapping the neck of a Gizmodo blogger. “However, I possess the Eye of Ayn Rand — really, it’s literally her eye — which revealed to me the dimensions, features, and cost of goods.”
Bezos shot 20 feet in the air on rocket-powered boots, and fired flechettes that struck and killed analysts from Gartner, IDG, and the Enderle Group. “This will destroy Apple’s iSlate,” said Rob Enderle, before expiring noisily.
While the market potential for tablet computers remains to be exploited, under any name, Amazon’s entry into the market, coupled with 100,000 soldier marketers training in distribution centers around the country may overwhelm Apple’s hundreds of stores.
Bezos displayed a map of the United States on which Apple Stores were located on the Krampus, and then use multi-finger gestures to trigger missiles and other explosives to destroy the stores and all matter in a half-mile radius around each shop.
The Krampus will have a 10.5-inch diameter LCD, a touch screen, 16 GB of storage, and both Wi-Fi and a cellular connection, and ship with a library of tens of millions of books forcibly scanned from libraries and publishers around the world. Pricing is yet to be determined, but it will be somewhere between 50% of your annual earnings and your immortal soul.
As the press conference concluded, Bezos engaged his shielding and deadly neutrino energy flooded the cavern. Shielded behind Enderle — a Microsoft Research cyborg made mostly of lead and beryllium — I alone survived to tell the tale.