Who made you the judge of what’s funny? I could not stop laughing for 4 minutes and 37 seconds. You must be one of those fruit worshippers my therapist warned me about.

Let me break it down for you as I see it:

1) Heading: “APPLE PRETENDS TO INVENT”

This provides the necessary stimulus(mention of Apple and ALL CAPS) to tune our brains to the necessary wavelength that will allow us to accept the information to follow.

2) Sub-heading: “Buttons”

A single-word nugget of information that speaks volumes (which, coincidentally, can now be altered on the Shuffle itself. See?). If you are not already laughing at the sheer audacity of Apple pretending to invent buttons, you’re then helpfully provided with a screen shot…

3) Screen shot.

Notice the humour(or alleged lack thereof) has now ceased, and we’re given the freedom to interpret the image however we like with no further prompting (and, therefore, possible alleged humour pitfalls, the likes of which you brought to the fore).

Now, here’s where the magic happens:

The screenshot contains the word “Buttons” as an actual heading itself. Notice the other headings – “Hundred of songs to go” and “VoiceOver”. The former’s blurb tells us Apple did indeed invent the Shuffle (perhaps not invent, rather, create) and, possibly, the idea of an MP3 player that clips to your person without any extra fittings. The latter, VoiceOver, can also be attributed to Apple. Granted, Apple may not have invented voice over in the general sense (text-to-speech, perhaps?), but there appears to be no obvious opposition to their having claimed it for their iPod range.

Now, you may well be excused for thinking that, sandwiched between to possible Apple inventions, buttons may also have been invented by Apple.

“Ah”, you say, “but I am not such a fool as to believe that Apple invented buttons!”. Perhaps, but I ask you to try and locate a heading resembling “Earphones”. Apple did not invent earphones (or maybe they pretended to when the first iPod was released?) and so they do not have their own headed section. In fact, anything Apple is not pretending to have invented is notable by its absence on that list. Orange? No. Pink? No. The play/pause/rw/ff/+/- symbols? No. What about the power and shuffle switches? No.

I’d go so far as to say that Apple is ‘pretending’ to be marginally more sensible than usual. Perhaps Steve feels we’re now ready to just accept that they invented all these things without needing any prompting.

4) Post-screen shot explanation

The explanation reminds me of the sort of nonsense Apple comes out with usually. It’s similar to the slip of paper that accompanies the Kleeneze catalogue that tells you you can make lots of money if you have the entrepreneurial skills to succeed, but you already know what that entails by the expression on the face of the Kleeneze distributor when he/she comes to collect the catalogue.