Why all the digging by the Apple faithful at Steve Jobs’ health?

January 5, 2009

BY ANDY IHNATKO Sun-Times Technology Columnist/ai@andyi.com

As an ecumenical tech columnist who nonetheless has deep tendrils into the Apple soil, it dismays me that Steve Jobs’ appearance — both in the “how’s he look today?” sense and the “why the bloody hell isn’t he showing up for the keynote at Macworld Expo” one — has been the subject of so much rumor and speculation.

I mean, Mac users: help me out, here. I always give you guys the benefit of the doubt, describing a “community spirit” as opposed to (say) a “cultlike hive mentality that makes me worry about what these people would do if they were armed.”

What I’m saying is that when the gossip and speculation about the Leader’s health approaches Mao-like levels of uncertainty and fear … you’re not making my job any easier.

I’m here at Macworld Expo and awoke this morning to read something that’s practically without precedent: a press release from Steve Jobs in which he discusses his personal life. [Link: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/01/05sjletter.html ]

Yes, Mac people: this is what you’ve driven him to. Steve Jobs, the man who banished the entire output of one of the world’s largest tech book publishers from the Apple Store shelves after they published an unauthorized biography, talked about his personal life.

“For the first time in a decade, I’m getting to spend the holiday season with my family, rather than intensely preparing for a Macworld keynote,” the letter begins, and it was a moment before I corrected myself and realized that he had, in fact, acknowledged the existence of living relatives previously.

He goes on to explain that he chose to have his doctors look into his weight loss a few weeks ago. “Sophisticated blood tests” diagnosed him with a hormonal imbalance that affects his body’s ability to make proper use of nutritional protein. “The treatment is simple and straightforward,” the letter continues, promising that he intends to remain Apple’s CEO for the foreseeable future.

Which, quite frankly, was always bloody obvious. Steve’s dropping out of the Macworld Expo keynote was a huge surprise, yes. It was such a reliable event on the Apple calendar that everybody forgot that the company never announces his presence until weeks before the show. Apple’s pulling out of Macworld Expo entirely after this year was a bigger bombshell, but it’s a perfectly sensible move for the company; the annual need to announce Something Big the week after New Year’s is a wholly artificially-imposed deadline and dropping out of the show means that everyone who works for the company — His Steveness included — can enjoy their holidays with one fewer source of stress.

Still, crazy rumors abound. And if people didn’t have access to any kind of insider Apple information whatsoever, they did have access to photos of Steve taken during 2007 and 2008 Apple events. And suddenly we were off and running, with some sites speaking of an iDeathbed. Unacceptable from a journalistic standpoint, and reprehensible from a humanistic one.

The extremist Ellen Jamesians in the Apple community — and, sadly, the industry analysts that can send Apple’s stock price tumbling with one hasty email sent with a Blackberry in one hand and a Big Mac in the other — need to understand some things about Steve Jobs’ health:

If his health ever takes the sort of turn that will affect his ability to run Apple in any way, we’ll know about it. Because shareholders get very persnickety when a publicly-traded company withholds that kind of information. The government isn’t a big fan, either. If Jobs were seriously ill and Apple didn’t disclose it, both of these entities would react in ways far, far more annoying to Apple than simply posting to a blog that they heard Steve had been wrapped in foil and put into suspended animation in a secret chamber underneath the Fifth Avenue Apple store.

So you shouldn’t believe any story about Steve’s health until you hear it from Apple.

Steve Jobs is a very, very wealthy man. I’m sure the Ellen Jamesians were already aware of that, but some of them might be from out of town and not be aware that in the US, very, very wealthy people have access to terrific healthcare.

A close family member of mine was diagnosed with terminal cancer a year ago, and I had the opportunity to learn how truly fine the leading edge of cancer research is. A death sentence becomes something closer to a chronic illness, thanks to experimental treatments so new and so fantastically far out of the mainstream that each weekly session costs more than thirty years’ worth of managed care.

So even if a future Letter From Steve were to reveal that Steve has been diagnosed with something that’s customarily terminal and inoperable, understand that those two words have different meaning when the patients have nearly unlimited resources.

Barring a problem that affects his ability to run the company, Steve Jobs has absolutely no obligation to reveal anything whatsoever about his personal life. Other CEOs like Richard Branson or Mark Cuban are eager for you to know that they have a forty million dollar protractor collection, headlined by a one-of-a-kind model made from the femur bone of Teddy Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture.

But that’s not Steve. So a lack of information about his personal life has no sinister undertones.

Maybe the most important thing to remember is this:

Steve Jobs is not your Dad.

He doesn’t love you. He doesn’t care about you. He doesn’t even know you’re alive.

He loves Apple, and he cares about the company’s products and future.

Good. You can’t buy a person’s love…but $199 will buy you one hell of a cool phone. Be content and leave the man and his family alone.

What do you think?