And now you know why headlines like this pop up on DailyMail.com: Apple ‘will sell an 18-carat gold, sapphire and crystal watch for $10,000’ in unprecedented move away from its ‘affordable luxury’ trademark. Note that the headline misleadingly suggests $10,000 is the official price and there is no indication that this is, in fact, mere speculation.
In fact, the use of single quotes to construct false statements is directly addressed by James King in the Gawker piece:
But so it goes at the Mail, which has all but abandoned the word “allegedly” in favor of putting quotation marks around a paraphrased description of the deed in question. The phrase in quotation marks never even appeared in the story. The punctuation served merely as a distancing mechanism.