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Comment by a-priori | Hacker News Reader

I think it's sad he feels compelled to reveal this personal information.

This is one of the downsides to being head of a publicly traded corporation - shareholders deserve to know about things like this. If Apple were private, it wouldn't matter.

a great deal of apple's strength is that they don't follow trends. if they listened to what the industry thinks, they would license osx for plain-vanilla pcs, compete against ugly low-cost hardware from their competitors, etc etc etc, until they were indistinguishable from dell or hp, and therefore completely uninteresting.

apple's refusal to follow trends comes right from the top. yes, it can be construed as arrogant that jobs hasn't commented on his health before now. but that's his way. this methodology has downsides, but it keeps the company from slogging it out in the sewers with all the other commodity manufacturers.

this announcement is a reaction to outside pressure, which is the opposite of what makes apple great.

"a great deal of apple's strength is that they don't follow trends. if they listened to what the industry thinks, they would license osx for plain-vanilla pcs, compete against ugly low-cost hardware from their competitors, etc etc etc, until they were indistinguishable from dell or hp, and therefore completely uninteresting."

They did exactly this a year before Jobs came back. In spite of Jobs's claims to the otherwise, the experiment did not last long enough to indicate whether it would have been viable in the long term. What is clear is that the clone makers where releasing computers more expandable and powerful than what Apple actually had on the market.

But Apple isn't just about powerful computers. It's about the Apple way. And for better or for worse, that means focusing on the complete package of the computer.

"Completely uninteresting" in exchange for "expandable and powerful" is not a good one for Apple to make.

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