what mr phreaky feels about this, personally i wish him good health

You mean the apples were turning sour?! Boom boom!!

Ahem.

Well someone had to say it - although on second thoughts....

Mine's the one displaying a total lack of imagination!

As we seem to be so concerned about the likes of Jobs, has anyone popped round to Bill & Mels place to see if they're ok in retirement?. Remember, if their letter box is full of free newspapers and pizza menu's Do Not presume they're on holiday.

Mine's the one with 'Clock Watcher' printed on the back.

Mr Phreaky's thoughts have gone unrecorded ever since someone saw fit to deduce (by whatever means) his password and post a bunch of Apple fanboyism in his name. Either that or he has retired in the safe knowledge that his one-man crusade has to smash Apple has succeeded, what with Apple's woeful financial results and diminishing market share announced this week... oh, wait a second...

@Thomas

RE-establishment of a design-oriented culture, shurely? Slashing the product line, ditching software projects that weren't delivering, pushing the company into new areas and fully exploiting them (AppleTV excepted, natch), those were Jobs' real contributions to sorting out the stinking mess that Sculley and Amelio had made between them. The company would certainly benefit from losing the perception that losing Teh Steve would kill Apple stone dead, not least to prevent the sort of stock market stupidity we've seen this week. The very real point is that Apple needs to have a workable succession plan in place: nobody lives forever, RDF or no.

Smugness normally comes with Inside Information, Thomas. ...aka ForeSight PreCogniscence.

amfM Pinging Apple Cores for AI Cloud Dead Head Control Lever ..... for Future Use :-)

Hey Jude, Let IT Be. IT is Inevitable when IT is True.

Welcome our cancer free Apple overlord.

So now the stock price is directly linked to his health level ?

I suggest they get a stool analyser installed in his office and tie it directly into the stock exchange. Call it iCrap.

Oh , he's had corn yesterday : time to up the stocks ...

Why so coy about the name of the infection?

I'm guessing an STD then. Not syphilis, since the symptoms don't match. Wait, I got it! Microbial intestinal parasites!

I'm hoping a good time was had by everyone involved. However many that would be.

I really don't think so. I'm a fairly big fan of Apple as a company; I converted to the Mac system a long while back and I really couldn't contemplate going back to Windows hell. Not only that, I got switched onto programming because of how simplistic and well thought out the dev environment for OS X is. I think I have a good handle on why Apple is so popular, both technologically and socially. And part of the magic equation, along with design-focussed engineering and an emphasis on quality over cost is the Steve factor. When the engineers that design the great products you know and love think they're finished, every single thing, from the smallest charger to the Mac Pro, gets sent to Steve for testing. And if Steve doesn't like it, it doesn't go. Even if it's a week from Expo and it's ready to ship. Even if everyone else in the company thinks it's amazing. And that's important, believe it or not. Not because Steve has some magical ability to instantly tell a winner from a loser (although he's usually pretty on the money), but because in most companies, no-one can stop the ball rolling once you get to the late stages. Very few CEO's have the balls to say "So what if it'll cost us $150 mil in dead stock to scrap it now, do it anyway". Very few can, since there's always another shmuck ready to smooth-talk the board and get in there. Even Steve was replaced once.

But no-one, no-one would replace Steve as CEO of Apple. Seriously, he could go on a murderous rampage (and he's the type to from all accounts), and he'd still be giving MacWorld Keynote's from his cell. Hence, any product anyone does in Apple has to pass the Steve test. If it doesn't, bye-bye product, and probably bye-bye job as well. Hence it spurs the developers on to greatness far more than raises and bonuses can. The fear of Steve is all-encompassing.

In the early days of his return to glory, he went on a streamlining binge; people were afraid to get on a lift with Steve in case when they got off it'd be to collect their things. He's cold, ruthless and absolutely willing to do anything to guarantee a good product, including canning things a week from launch, sacking the entire team, and killing your first-born too, if needs be.

For the hope of the Apple stock I hope to purchase when I have the cash, I hope to hell the evil git's with us for a good couple of decades yet.

Steve's one of the lucky ones. These tumours are so rare and variable that very little data exists on appropriate therapies.

Once you've finished sucking up to iGadgets and big cat operating systems, you find out more about the condition here: http://www.netpatientfoundation.com/?page_id=2

Doesn't one need to be alive in order to get cancer?

I wouldn't think an animated mechanical reality distortion device would be able to get such a tissue-based disease.

Ok, first of all, Best of luck to Steve, I truly hope all his health problems are behind him now, and that he grows strong and lives long.

But secondly, some commentors here are missing the point. A company doesn't need great people behind it OR great products to be succesfull. Just look at MS, led by (until recently) Bill Gates and Steve Balmer - and with windows et al as a product range, but yet still the most successful brand on earth, and the richest company in the world. Nuff said.

.... because my last piece-of-shit Mac portable, a still in mint condition last series G4 iBook which I rarely used, mostly because OS X sooooo sucks, just had it's Firewire port die for no damn reason other that its an Apple piece of shit. This after a perfectly good G4 1 Gig TiBook had premature death by piece of shit LCD design. Another piece of shit Apple design flaw like ALL the other ones that are historically fact and are fully documented all over the internet.

Well Stevie asshole, if you don't have another bout with pancreatic cancer, then at least I hope you catch Dengue Fever and you tiny dick falls off before you drop dead, you limousine liberal piece of shit making, er selling since you MAKE nothing, arrogant asshole.

Now you know .... the rest of the story.

Much as I'm not a fan of Apple's design-based philosophy, I'd also like to wish Steve the best of health in the future and hope that he recovers fully from this common bug or whatever he's got.

It's the horrendously sentimental "get well soon" decal on the back

iWishhimwell

i'll get me coat....

I thought Steve Jobs was vegan. If so, I wonder if maybe this ailment was before he became vegan. If he's not...then he should be. It will fix all his problems I'm pretty sure.

_rey

That explains a lot.

Vega's emission spectrum is characterised by lines from the Hydrogen Balmer series. I now understand the recent El Reg icon confusion.

@Rey Ortega

He's a pescetarian. And veganism? Surely it beats the average US-citizen diet, but I doubt if it's healthier than pescetarianism.

Frankly I'm súre it's healthier, but hey, don't let facts get you in the way.

Vegans that don't eat apples?

Here's a sure fire way of making a quick buck on Apple shares: The day after a press-release or quarterly review, buy APPL right after the Wall Street panic dip. When they recover a week later, sell or hold them for the next roller-coaster.

If you kept them, sell the day before an earnings report, use the cash to buy more back the day after for the same cash.

if he had been ready to pop his clogs they'd have had to be sure to nail the lid down well to stop him rising again on the third day....

Terrible taste I know....I wish him and Fisher-Price ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h Apple well.

"Christ you couldn't use a 5 year old PC laptop for anything other than a doorstop these days" - this is not true. I use an eight-year-old laptop as a bedside table; it keeps books and things at just the right height. Also, it makes a handy flat surface for lines of cocaine, etc.

I appear to be in some strange place where Webster Phreaky is actually Spartacus.

I need a drink.

No, I'M Webster Phreaky!

I hereby demand that El Reg substitutes "Webster Phreaky" for "Anonymous Coward" when anonymous comments are posted. Purely because it amuses me very much indeed.