Steve Jobs Preparing His Farewell? | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs Preparing His Farewell?

gizmodo.com

28 pointsmariorz30 comments

Is sharing the stage an easy means of diluting the impact of stories about Steve Job's health?

Given the jittery stock market prices each time a Jobs health story is written, this seems like good business sense.

It will take some time to bring home the message to stock holders; Steve Jobs is not Apple, and Apple is not Steve Jobs.

It does not need to indicate Steve Jobs is leaving.

SJ looks pretty thin in the last picture.

isstevejobsstillalive.com

I think _thin_ is an understatement

I wouldn't worry about it. You can't be too thin. Or too powerful.

http://images.teamsugar.com/files/users/1/15111/34_2007/imac...

I definitely got this vibe from the proceedings as well. Especially from the Macbook video that is all Ive. It's sad to see him go but good to know that it will be a slow transition.

I got the vibe too, however the product videos have always been mostly-Ive, and have never included Steve.

I think he'll be around long enough for the new Newton.

I was kind of thinking that the iphone was the new newton.

Now that that's out of the way, Steve's got nothing left to prove. Maybe its time to kick back a little.

All I want is a 10" MacBook Air before Steve kicks the bucket.

And a 60" Apple TV (not a stupid box, a real TV)

I don't think so really. I mean the MacBooks are a design masterpiece and what better person to present them than their lead designer. I wouldn't read too much into this.

Ah, dammit. Goddammit all. This is bad.

I don't understand all this talk about his health being a private matter. I sure wouldn't feel that way if I were an AAPL shareholder.

If you were an AAPL shareholder, nobody would be holding a gun to your head and preventing you from selling your AAPL stock.

That's true, but you could say the same about anything else they might want to suppress. Should Apple hide crippling delays in its next line of iPods because, after all, no one's holding a gun to the heads of the shareholders?

Of course, you could argue that companies are (or should be) under no obligation to disclose anything they don't want to. The market would then work its magic by punishing (via fewer stock purchases) those companies that were insufficiently transparent.

I'm sympathetic to that position, but that's not the argument people make. Instead, they place Jobs's health into the special category of "privacy", as if that's the only rationale they need. My point is that making the health of the iconic CEO off-limits is simply an arbitrary social norm; it's not written in stone.

They should be obliged to disclose anything about the business. And obliged to keep private anything about any employee's health (or finances, or other private/personal concerns).

Privacy is the only rationale I need. Steve Jobs is a person, entitled to be happy, suffer, live in private.

Yes it makes things less predictable for you, but you have shares in the company, not the CEO, so ... tough.

I agree that they shouldn't be obligated to reveal anything about Jobs's health; I'm just identifying the "private" status of a CEO's health as an arbitrary social convention rather than an objective fact.

Time to short AAPL?

Unfortunately, I think you missed your window. Apple dropped from ~180 to ~90 in the past month and a half. (It's been up a little over the past two days.)

If I weren't worried about completely un-diversifying my portfolio, I'd buy more now while it's cheap.

I think the chance that gizmodo is full of shit is much higher then the chance that Steve Jobs walks away from apple while it's turning into his vision. It seems much more likely to me that some asshat at gizmodo wants pageviews then that this analysis is right. Part of Steve's Jobs job (um) is to train execs that are ready to step into his shoes. That doesn't mean he is leaving.

Have you seen Steve Jobs lately? We are literally watching the man be eaten away by cancer. I am not sure if he has much of a choice in the matter.

Wasn't he cured?

He apparantly had a heart attack a couple days ago.

Are you talking about the fake CNN iReport?

Probably, but there's always a risk that it might come back. Or it could be something else all together. Either way he won't live forever.

You can't cure cancer. He was successfully treated and I believe the cancer went into remission, but to say the prognosis is grim might be the understatement of the millenium. Less than 5% of those diagnosed with pancreatic cancer survive 5 years. Median survival is only 3-6 months from diagnosis. It is an extremely efficient killer.

> Less than 5% of those diagnosed with pancreatic cancer survive 5 years.

It's my understanding that pancreatic cancer survival rates vary significantly by type and that Jobs has an (extremely) rare type that has fairly good survival rates.

I hope so.

My dad died of pancreatic cancer. All I can say when I see Steve is, "Looks familiar." Sadly.

Yeah. He's skinny. So what. Lots of monks are that skinny. He's obviously nearly completed his metamorphosis into the first of the aliens that will whisk us away in a few years. That doesn't mean he's gonna die, it just means he is becoming so good at manipulating the reality distortion field and his psychic energies that the lower aspects of his body is burning away. He's good. You don't say a caterpillar is dying because it's turning into a butterfly. Steve's Jobs slow transformation into a grey isn't any different then that.

You should of read this all on your iPhone already, if you can figure out the secret gesture to unlock it, if you want him to come pick you up with his UFO brethren.

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