On Oct. 4, the day Apple (AAPL) unveiled the iPhone 4S, CNN’s Erin Burnett aired one of her “Seriously?!” pieces, a format in which the straight-talking anchor uses a mocking tone to puncture what- or whomever her target happens to be that day.

On Tuesday, it was the pre-announcement buzz surrounding the new iPhone.

“We visited our local Apple store,” she says in her intro, “to join in the excitement.”

The store, it turns out, was mostly empty, and the customers interviewed (by an unidentified male voice, not Erin’s) didn’t know — or seem to care — much about the new phone. They just knew they wanted one.

“Seriously, Apple fans?” she asks, before ridiculing the phone’s name (4S for “seriously?!”) and its Siri personal assistant (“that you can communicate with if you’re lonely”).

I’ve been critical of Burnett in the past (see How not to interview a hedge fund legend and CNBC’s anti-Apple crusader) for trashing a company she didn’t seem to understand. I always suspected that the things she said about Apple — referring to it as “a bubble,” the  “s–t stock of 2008” and “the short of the century” — were just part of a pose she adopted to draw attention to herself.

But she had no way of knowing that a few hours after her “Seriously Apple?!” piece aired Steve Jobs would be dead, and the rest of the world — including CNN — would be mourning the creator of the company she loved to mock.

You can watch Burnett’s piece on her blog here or in the Vodpod version below the fold.

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