All Articles Tagged jobs health

During Tuesday’s “Spotlight on Notebooks” Keynote, Steve Jobs wasn’t the only jean-and-dark-shirt uniformed Apple exec on stage. COO Time Cook took an unusual turn, discussing Mac business. SVP of Design, Jonathan Ive, an even more unusual presence in front of the audience, introduced the new “brick” unibody concept. And Marketing VP Phil Schiller — who’s no stranger to Keynotes — took part in the Q&A at the end.

It wasn’t all Steve, all the time.

Because of this, Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz says Steve may be thinking of leaving in the near future, to live out his days on the beach, content that he’s shown investors and customers that Team Apple will Boom! along quite nicely without him, much as Microsoft is… er… doing without Gates in the daily driver’s seat:

Steve Jobs is leaving Apple. Not tomorrow, but probably very soon. That’s why he started to say good bye today, doing something more important than just presenting new MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and an updated MacBook Air. Today’s event was a play in which he clearly told everyone that the company is more than himself. Since the very first minute, when he immediately sat down to let Tim Cook talk, he was saying: “Hey, look, Apple is more than Steve. These are The Guys, the Goodfellas, the A-Team. They share the same vision I have. And they are going to push the company forward when I change my office chair for a hammock and caipirinhas on my private beach in Hawaii”.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, however, says Steve isn’t going anywhere. He points out that Jobs has shared the stage before, often letting adepts take the more highly specialized presentations, like introducing Leopard at WWDC. Gruber says:

But so long as he’s healthy, working at Apple is exactly the thing Jobs wants to do. He’s consumed by his work, and I think it’s only in the last two or three years that Apple has gotten to the point where Jobs feels he has a decent set of crayons at his disposal. In Jobs’s mind, the iPhone is only the beginning of what a truly flourishing Apple can produce. Why would he leave now? “A hammock and caipirinhas on a private beach” would be living hell for Steve Jobs.

We’re with Gruber on this one. While Diaz is saying what many of us were likely thinking during the show, Jobs doesn’t strike us as the casual CEO. His investment in Apple is lifelong. He’s not Woz, he’s the Wizard, and they’ll have to pry his hand off Apple’s perfectly balanced, aluminum and gloss black steering wheel if that’s ever going to change.

Wow. Anyone remember what Steve Jobs did to the New York Times when they merely inquired about his health? Imagine what he’ll do to those poor fools at Bloomberg’s who just accidentally published — and then rapidly retracted — his obituary. (Our guess? 9-finger Wu-Shi death touch, minimum).

According to Gawker, the obit-fart:

…contains nothing to indicate Bloomberg has new information on Jobs’s health, at least in our quick skim.

Real Dan (the artist formerly known as Fake Steve), offers perhaps a more appropriate take on both the incident and its reporting:

Luckily, Gawker decided to humiliate Bloomberg by publishing the entire obit, including the list of people that Bloombots should call if/when Dear Leader actually does die, which I’m still not sure he ever will, because as far as I can recall from all that Greek and Latin I took in high school a man-god born of Zeus and mortal woman should be an immortal being, and furthermore, how would Apple PR handle it? I suppose for a while they could just stonewall by saying they weren’t here today to talk about Steve, they were here to talk about how excited everyone is about [FILL IN NAME OF NEW PRODUCT HERE] and maybe they could buy themselves a year or two during which the Apple faithful would continue to believe Steve was really alive despite having seen reports to the contrary on the news.

Strangely, we can’t seem to determine whose filthy hackery is the most fake these days…

One of the most important aspects of the iPhone is how it’s breathed the air of change into long stodgy, backwards thinking mobile cellular providers. We can argue whether its been less effective post iPhone 3G where subsidies have returned, but either way Apple fairly neatly removed the carrier middleman from its usual intrusive position in the smartphone space. App Store is clearly the crowning example thus far, but frequent firmware updates is sometimes likewise cited.

On the latest This Week in Tech (TWiT) podcast, however, Digg founder Kevin Rose credited an unnamed source inside Apple as saying AT&T had to approve the next iPhone firmware update. Of course, Rose has been, er… somewhat less than accurate in regards to iPhone news in the past (including his reports that the iPhone 3G would have video iChat). In his corner this time, however, are server logs showing iPhone 2.0.1 traffic on popular Apple news sites originating from both Cupertino and AT&T HQ regions.

Has AT&T always played a role in firmware testing or is this a new factor in a post 3G world? If it’s new, will it make 2.x updates take longer than 1.x did? And do international carriers like 02, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Rogers, Orange, etc. all have similar advanced testing privileges? If so, will 22+ (70+ eventually) carriers wanting to test new firmware result in huge delays or staggered launches? Or is this just another well Dugg tempest in a Royal Jasmine teapot?

On a side note, the same episode of TWiT saw the crankiest of geeks, John C. Dvorak “dot org slash blog” claim that one particularly damaging rumor circulating about Steve Jobs current health was deliberately and maliciously spread at an exclusive CEO gathering by an as-yet unnamed but well known executive with a personal grudge against Jobs and Apple. Dvorak maintains the rumor, which recent reports have indicated is false, was spread to other CEOs who then propagated it, adding to the confusion and downward pressure on Apple’s stock. If he can get a second anonymous confirmation on the story, Dvorak claims he will name names in his Marketwatch column.

As a huge fan of Karma, that should make for an interesting day, and likely more than a “slime bucket” response from El Jobso.