Dear iConsumers,

It has come to our attention that many of you are worried about our use of 5-year-old children in Asian sweatshops. It is only natural that you should be concerned about our labour practices, and especially the regulations concerning our sweatshops in East Asia, notably Vietnam, Laos and a few other places we can’t quite remember right now.

I would like to reassure all iConsumers that all of the children working in our sweatshops have been trained rigorously, and that no stone has been left unturned in our quest to find the hardest-working toddlers in the Far East. We have put together a training programme that ensures your iPhones and iPads will be produced to the highest quality, and seek to guarantee our customers that quality measures have been implemented in each and every sweatshop.

For example, our sweatshop in Ho Chi Min City has implemented a Six Sigma process, which has helped extend the childrens’ working hours from 20 hours to 22 hours per day. Our sweatshop in Panang has implemented a system which reduces the number of hours’ daylight a child has access to, improving their productivity by 6% and increasing the number of iPhones produced at that particular sweatshop by 3%.

All across our sweatshops in Thailand, we have withheld payment from our toddlers, and have instead offered them biscuits and sweets, which cost Apple less and have, in fact, increased productivity and engagement to such levels that the children never stop work. After 72 hours, each toddler receives a biscuit and a glass of water, which doctors say is the minimum required to produce an iPhone. And yes, to maintain production levels, we ensure that the biscuit and water break lasts no more than five minutes.

These are just some of the ways we have modified out sweatshop procedures to help you, the customer, so that you can get your iPhone on time, and in full working order. Should you have any complaints over the standard of your iPhone or iPad, please phone our “Sweatshop Complaints” helpline, and we will be able to pinpoint exactly which toddler made the manufacturing mistake and have them shot.

Disclaimer: This isn’t actually from Apple, you know. It’s satire and none of it is true. So if you’re from Apple, hello!

A beta version of the new John Humphrys software was run in secret just after the general election. Tests proved so successful that John Humphrys 2.0 has now gone live, six weeks ahead of schedule.

John Humphrys 2.0 addresses various bugs, including the conversation sequencing problem that caused the presenter to interrupt interviewees repeatedly and for no apparent reason. It has also removed the involuntary Humphrys tut upon hearing the words ‘Twitter’ and ‘Facebook’.

The new software is still more clunky than the program run on the Twitter-compatible Evan Davies platform. However, John Humphrys 2.0 is now quicker than James Naughtie 2.1.8, which is scheduled for a patch update to fix the overly long question bug and purple prose issue.

Listeners to the Today programme are said to have noticed the mellower attitude of Humphrys 2.0. BBC IT boss Rom MacReboot said: “The old Humphrys tended to overheat quite quickly, so his interviewing technique tended to generate more heat than light. Now, with the installation of LEDs and revised software, his heat-light balance has been recalibrated.”

Humphrys’ lexicon has also been updated to include common management phrases such as ‘going forward’ and ‘stakeholder’. As a result, he no longer has to bark “But what does that mean?” when business leaders use irritating but well-known workplace phrases. Despite this, Humphrys 2.0 still finds the advanced management-speak of BBC director general Mark Thompson “baffling and impenetrable”. The digital Justin World-Wide-Webb platform has been reprogrammed to decode Thompson’s comments for Humphrys – and the world generally.

One other glitch remains, said Rom MacReboot:  “The John Humphrys platform is still unable to support a mobile phone interface. So his mobile communication needs will continue to be met by a loud hailer and, in quiet carriages, semaphore. But John Humphrys is a very robust platform – they don’t build them like that any more – and we’re pleased the upgrade has extended this analogue platform’s working capability further into the digital 24-hour news age.”

The Humphrys 2.0 upgrade was carried out using techniques pioneered by the IT team that supported HRH The Queen Mother, whose platform was finally dismantled after her catalogue B leaf tree nodes suffered a fatal gin spillage.

John Humphrys’ real first name is Desmond. He is 112.

“This is awful news,” said Sky’s Head of HD Sales, Victor Sucebite, pictured above. “The news that millions of families around the UK will be left in HD poverty is worse than any news about children being beaten up or houses being burnt down. It is every family’s right to have High Definition televisions in their home ahead of the World Cup – in exchange for a mere £200 per month plus a HD received and a high-definition ready TV, which is nothing, really, when you think about it. If they don’t have it, imagine the pain and the torment that they will go through during the World Cup.”

“They won’t be able to see Wayne Rooney’s nasal hair”, he mused. “They won’t be able to see the outline of Kaka’s testes, or the laces on Thierry Henry’s boots. They won’t be able to see the full majesty of the South Korean national team’s floppy hair, each and every strand a magnificent zeitgeist, a standing monument to hairdressing and football. How can they go to work the next day and talk about the game on an equal footing? Can you imagine how these viewers must feel, only watching on normal flatscreen televisions? I’m sickened to think that our government is leaving behind all of these people in HD Hardship.”

HD fanatic Eddie Gullible has had HD TV since it came out, and said: “I was one of the first to get a HD telly, and I can’t believe I’ve lived all my life without one. In fact, when I look back at my non-HD years, I feel sick about myself. I feel like I’ve wasted all of those years with low-quality, shit TV. Where would I be if I couldn’t watch the warbling throat mechanisms of X-Factor entrants? Where would I be if I couldn’t see every gobule of spit emitted from a footballer’s mouth? I’d be lost, quite frankly.”

“When I heard that most of the country would be without HD TV for the World Cup, I thought – well, I have to do something.”

Gullible founded “The HD Foundation”, a charity that aims to bring High Definition to the masses. The charity aims to increase knowledge of High Definition television among “poor people” and “the ignorant middle classes”, and will mostly involve a network of pub bores banging on about how HD is the future and that everyone should part with £350 per month for the privilege of high definition.

“It’s the future. Well, that and 3D television, but I haven’t got that yet.”

“It’s ridiculous,” claimed Mumsnet founder carrotbake76. “I mean, I want the best for little Quentin, but I don’t need an embedded satellite navigation system informing him, in the voice of Chris Fucking Tarrant, where the nearest Early Learning Centre is, and I certainly don’t need the bleeping parking radar.”

“It’s a bloody pushchair, for christ’s sake. He sits in it, he gurgles a bit, I take him somewhere, I take him out of it – and can I fold it? Can I heckers like – it’s bigger than my 4×4!”

The “Baby Bugaboo GTi” is available for just £2,495, and McLaren engineers are proud of their latest pushchair. Head of Design, Juniper Branflake-Jones said that the “Baby Bugaboo GTi is the next step in pushchair design. Mothers don’t want the under-complications of a simple, folding, easy-to-store pushchair. What they want is the absolute, cast-iron guarantee that their child is going to be completely and utterly wrapped in cotton wool. That’s why we’ve created it to have a fully shock-resistant frame, and what’s more, it’s eco-friendly!”

“No self-respecting mother would be without one – you’d be practically KILLING your baby if you bought anything for under £2,300, frankly. And your child will love you forever if you spend more than £3,000. We did a survey, and found that mothers who spent less than £2,000 on their first pushchair were risking being hated by their children for life – and I do mean life.”

Babies have expressed their complete and utter ignorance for the pushchair, although some have expressed curiosity at the combination of ice-cream cone holder, milk bottle holder and rattle holder, while most have simply had fun playing with the air conditioning and the radio dials.

“Fun!” said 7-year-old Giles, from Bromley. “I know, I should have started walking years ago, but why walk when you can sit in the Baby Bugaboo GTi? THIS is the way forward. Now – take me to McDonalds, Baby Bugaboo!”

“We’re urging people to stay well away from their computers,” said Detective Inspector Fawning-Buttocks from Scotland Yard. “The PowerPoint murderer is getting wiser, and his techniques even more death-defyingly boring each time. The latest victim was obviously subjected to several hours of “death by PowerPoint” – we found him in a pool of his own stupor.”

The PowerPoint murderer struck for the first time last week at a conference in Little Shytte, killing three C-level executives with what police have described as the most “chilling” slide deck they have ever seen.

“The hideous use of bullet points is one of the PowerPoint murderer’s calling cards”, added Fawning-Buttocks. “Yet he has so many – it’s hard to say how and when he’s going to strike next. In this particularly gruesome deck, he overloaded his victims with bullet points to begin with, before moving on to the more insidious pie charts. Not only did he introduce pie charts, it is believed that he used zoom-in, fade-in and fade-out animation for each section of the pie chart. It is at this point that we believe his first victim died.”

He continued: “The other two struggled on, only to be slain by the clip art image of a pencil figure with a question mark over his head, intended to ask the audience if they have any questions. The only question his victims had was ‘is there life after this presentation?’. Clearly, the answer was a grisly ‘no’.”

Detectives do believe that they have found clues. At the location of each killing, a set of what the killer calls “handouts” have been found, with nouns used as verbs – another of the killer’s trademarks. They have also issued a description of the PowerPoint killer, who they say is “slightly dull, with a receding hairline, grey suit, grey shirt and glasses, a monotone voice and a horrifying belief in his jokey camaraderie.”

“We’re closing in on him – the net is tightening,” added Fawning-Buttocks in a volley of cliches. “However, we’re worried that he will strike again soon, and that he is developing new ways of boring people to death. Only last week, a man was grievously attacked and hospitalised after an incident with an excel spreadsheet. The attacker got away, but please, be vigilant. Stay at home, stay offline, and don’t approach anyone who looks remotely dull.”

App developer Simon Nerdlinger unveiled his creation at a glitzy ceremony in his bedroom / living room in Watling. “It’s going to revolutionise how sweatshops work,” he beamed. “Before, a sweatshop owner would have to think to himself – hey, this 5-year-old is working 72 hours a week, but the truth is, I can make him work 80, maybe 90. That’s just how good the app is.”

“Basically, he just keys in the age of the worker, the job role – you know, which could be welding on parts, it could be fetching tea, it could be stitching together those fancy little iPod pouches – and the app tells him how many hours a week the child can work before falling over through exhaustion. It’s brilliant – what’s more, you can shake it and there’s a little image of an infant sweatshop worker falling from his seat through tiredness. Hilarious! I laughed my arse off designing that.”

The app can also be used to prod slacking children, as it emits a small electric shock as it vibrates. Factory managers can approach the child and startle them back into productive mode. An additional feature also helps managers calculate which children are not pulling their weight – a complicated formula that Nerdlinger admits took him several weeks to write:

“You have to think about so many variables – the product being made, the hours already worked in the week, the child’s motivation, i.e. how much is he earning – you just pop all that information into the handy little calculator and it can say that, for example, little Li Bong Wong or whatever he’s called, he’s working at 80% capacity, and Wang Mung Bung or whatever, he’s working at 50% capacity. So really, it’s a great little efficiency tool for all of Apple’s suppliers.”

Cassette copying has grown in popularity since the invention of the portable music device, and is thought to be losing the record industry a staggering £100 a week. Since the start of the year, a total of fifty teenagers have been caught copying from cassette to cassette or from vinyl to cassette, and sharing their music illegally.

“Music piracy is rife”, said Rick Wankleman from Sony. “The number of people out there illegally copying cassettes is alarming. We even caught one young boy trying to copy from one cassette radio to another by putting them really close together. Can you imagine the amount of money that Michael Jackson is losing because kids are taping copies of ‘Bad’ and not buying them for £4 down at Our Price? They’ll cripple us!”

The music industry is worried at the growing popularity of the cassette, and the tumbling price of the “Walkman” which is encouraging people to copy even more music than before. A trend towards making “mix tapes” is causing concern at Hit Parade Records, whose Managing Director Davo Pongwee says “what’s wrong with the Now! collection? People think they can just copy music and make their own mix tapes – it’s going to bring the industry to its knees! One mix tape alone contains at least 10 examples of piracy. All of us will be on the bread line by 1984 at this rate.”

“Only last week, we had to arrest a teenage girl for putting a cassette recorder next to the television and recording Top of the Pops. She didn’t think she was doing anything wrong, but Bananarama are losing tens of pounds every week because of the likes of her. The poor girls will never be able to afford that mansion in Los Angeles at this rate. These illegal cassette copiers have to be stopped, and arresting them, and potentially cutting their hands off if Thatcher will allow it, is the only route we can take.”

The NME’s Baz “Bootleg” Onions is leading the campaign to free the cassette copiers from jail, saying “the freedom to exchange copies of Sinitta’s latest 12 inch is a basic human right, even though it’s Sinitta.”

Doctors told Paul N’Ohope that he was just “one phone call away from death” when he checked into the Norwich Royal Hospital last week. N’Ohope told doctors that he was “painting the ceiling”, and fell in an awkward position, leaving his iPhone perilously up his back passage.

“I always paint the ceiling naked,” explained N’Ohope. “It’s just one of our little traditions round our way. I fell at such a terrible angle that my iPhone went all the way up, and I couldn’t get it out. Naturally, I went straight to the hospital and while yes, the doctors found it very funny, their faces straightened pretty quickly when they realised that I may be one vibrating phone call from death.”

For several days, N’Ohope lived in gratitude that very few people ever called him on the iPhone, although said he was “quite excited” at a couple of text messages. “It was bizarre,” he explained, “but it made me realise that life is so precarious. One day you can be trying to insert your iPho… I mean, falling off a stepladder, the next you could be in hospital thinking a text might kill you.”

N’Ohope was given a chance of survival by a plucky iPhone app designer, IT technician “Guru” Nigel Pasdamis from Farnborough, near Ipswich. Pasdamis had been working on an app to make the iPhone find its way out of a maze, something that he himself admits would be “one of the most useless apps ever invented”.

“I was bored,” he said, “and I thought – hey, what if you could write an app that would make a vibrating iPhone find its way around a maze independently of human interaction. I was working on it for several weeks, and wasn’t really making much progress. Then I read Paul’s story in the local paper and realised I could be of assistance.”

Doctors managed to activate the app using revolutionary keyhole surgery, and prayed that the app would find its way out, and not work its way up N’Ohope’s rectum.

“We basically stood back and said a little prayer”, claimed Dr Tueurdejoie of the Norwich Royal Hospital. “Installing the app wasn’t a problem – it took a while to install, and for a second, we thought – hey, what if it’s not compatible? But within a few minutes, it was on its way out and Mr N’Ohope was able to leave hospital.”

N’Ohope claims that he has learned his lesson: “I owe my health to an app developer from Farnborough. That’s the last time I erm, paint the ceiling naked, I tell you.”

Founder Oswald Puback said that he created the group to raise awareness of those slipping standards, and says “Back in the 1990s, you could find yourself a Russian bride from Moscow or wherever and her picture would be well stunning. Yeah, sure, she’d already have a husband over there and several kids, but that was a different kind of woman. These days, it’s all shot-putters called Olga from the Volga and I don’t think they’re putting in much effort.”

“Perhaps all the best ones have been taken?”

Russian Bride website user Dan Mollycoddled from Shytte in Norfolk told the Daily Shame that he has been “on and off the website for about 15 years”, and says “in the past you used to be able to send them money and they’d at least respond to you. These days – they’re mostly munters and they don’t even bother responding. I had no idea that there was a finite number of hot women over there.”

Vladimir Putin, however, has pledged to restore Russian pride in its brides, and acknowledges that while the quality of your average Russian bride may have decreased over the last few years, there are still “plenty of women looking for a middle-aged grease monkey with a job in IT.” He insisted that the export of brides was “Russia’s main industry” for many years, and said that “the fellas are so drunk, we have to send the women somewhere else. There’s loads of them.”

Russian brides have reacted furiously to the claims that they are letting themselves down. 18-stone wattler Irina Borisova from Ekaterinberg said “I have come down from 25 stone to 18 stone in the space of just one week on my profile, and I replace my picture with one of nude supermodel. I will do all I can to support President Putin’s great effort to promote Mother Russia and export its brides for economic benefit of country.”

“But have you consider that average standard of average Western man has gone down also? They have no shame, they even put up real profile pictures of hairy man in vest in front of computer screen. He have no hair on his head. Still, at least he won’t be tanked up on vodka every night and he have good job in IT.”

Adoring Apple fans all gathered round to get a sniff of Jobs’ new iShit, and thousands have already registered online to get their own portable Turd, priced roughly between $399 and $599 depending on consistency and size. “I’ve been working on the iShit for several weeks now,” said Jobs. “With our technicians, we have been working out diet, timings, and other factors such as mood, which have an influence on the defecation I produce.”

He continued: “Bill Gates has never produced a stool this shiny – his last one was stodgy and frankly it had nowhere near the gloss and sheen of the iShit.”

Indeed, Windows have been lagging behind in production, and their Windows Pooh V7 is approximately six months away. Beta testers have described it as “lacking a certain je ne sais quoi” and “really hard to get your head around.” One user testing forum member, freewilly85, wrote “It’s OK – much better than Windows Pooh v6.5 – but what’s the point? What does it do? Why did they produce it? I see no reason for getting one.”

A campaign has already been launched asking Windows users to host “Pooh V7 parties”, although take-up has been “really crap”, joked one Windows insider.

Apple advocates around the world have been filling web forums with adoring comments such as “I cant w8 to get mi handz on da iShit” and “wow lol how can i get one ov thoze? is mega.” At the unveiling of the iShit, Apple Fanclub member Stephanie Facetious was filled with a sense of wonder: “It was an amazing display. I mean, they’ve been brewing up something massive for weeks and the rumours on the net were circling that it was an iPiss or something like that.”

She revealed: “When Steve strode out onto the stage, we all knew something amazing was going to happen because he pulled down his pants and – well, you can guess the rest. I love Apple so much, I gave up on God and baseball.”