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Steve Jobs is 'cancer-free'

Apple chief exec Steve Jobs has been able to assure its board that he's cancer-free, four years after undergoing surgery to treat a rare form of pancreatic cancer. Jobs told associates that his recent weight loss is due to nutritional problems resulting from the surgery, The New York Times reports. The paper adds that he went …

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ScientologyIsACult
Happy

iwonder...

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

Thomas

I wish Steve the best of health, etc,

but does anybody else think that at this stage Apple might be better off without him? The way I figure it, a lot of the Apple turnaround was the influx of the entire set of NextStep employees and the establishment of a design-oriented culture. Jobs brought the employees with him and was instrumental in the the culture, but surely it's impossible that he's doing so much for the company that it possibly wouldn't benefit more from having a less smug personality on-stage for product announcements?

Chris

On a serious note

Of course no decent person would ever wish cancer on their worst enemy - and that includes me. I too wish him the best of health and long may he live. He's achieved some remarkable things at Apple.

But I can't help thinking that the cracks in the Apple empire are starting to appear / widen ever so slightly recently.

iPod, iPhone... it's already starting to tire a little - whatever comes next will have to be something very special indeed!

Chris
Coat

Re: prior to the launch of the iPod, Apple was seen as a declining brand

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!

Danger Mouse
Coat

Help The Aged

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.

Anonymous Coward
Jobs Halo

@ ScientologyIsACult

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.

amanfromMars
Alien

Virtually Alien Art with Global Operating Devices.

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.

Anonymous Coward
Thumb Up

I for one

Welcome our cancer free Apple overlord.

Anonymous Coward
Joke

huh ? what ?

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 ...

This post has been deleted by a moderator

Anonymous Coward
Paris Hilton

Common Bug?

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.

This post has been deleted by its author

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

iCancer

Ok some had to say it

proops
Black Helicopters

Neuroendocrinology

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

Matt
Jobs Horns

Hrm ..

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.

Kenny Millar
Jobs Halo

Yeah but

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.

Webster Phreaky
Jobs Horns

Geez, that's really too bad....

.... 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.

Adam Foxton
Coat

Cancer-free jobs

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

Chris Irvine
Coat

suprised i'm the first to say it this way

iWishhimwell

i'll get me coat....

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

ah well

no entry here then http://www.deathlist.net *sigh*

Rey Ortega
Jobs Halo

Go Vegan

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

jai

RE: I wish Steve the best of health, etc,

the trouble is, the last time they tried, to two idiots that took over basically ran the company into the ground because they thought it would be a great idea to run Mac OS on generic looking boxes, and then on cheap clones (which is just one step from running it on generic pc hardware)

if Jobs hadn't come back, there would be no Apple any more

sure, that's not to say that no one could replace him as do as good a job (ha ha) but the guys that tried it before failed completely. seems a bit blaze for a company to pin it's future on the theory that "3rd times a charm"

TeeCee
Jobs Halo

He's Vegan?

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.

Gerrit Tijhof
Jobs Halo

Yeah, going vegan is the cure for cancer

@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.

Ascylto

@ Webster

You don't need to have cancer to be sick ... as evidenced by Webster Phreaky who clearly has a diseased bile duct.

Scott Mckenzie

Ah, Webster...

.....cos yes, that's right, 5 year old PC based laptops all work swimmingly don't they.

Christ you couldn't use a 5 year old PC laptop for anything other than a doorstop these days, let alone put the companies latest OS on it....

But hey.

Anonymous Coward
Alert

Whats the term for...

Vegans that don't eat apples?

Pavlovs well trained dog

@ Matt

'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.'

I did wonder why that mechanical general in Star Wars (general Devious? nafc actually) - who was quite ok to survive in space, but hacked, wheezed and coughed his way thru the movie.

Jared Earle
Jobs Halo

How to make money on Apple shares

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.

Thomas

@Math Campbell

If you're going to buy Apple stock, you should apparently wait until the next time they announce record profits. That seems to drive the stock down.

OS X is quite clearly much closer to NextStep than the Classic OS, and I'm sure Steve is directly involved in a lot of final product release decisions, but I can't help feeling that a lot of what we perceive to be true about him is probably spin designed to reinvigorate shareholder interest in the company post-1997. Everyone could see that the company was a mess, so it was important to be able to say "the new CEO can see the problems and is fixing them". Most of Apple's moves have been the right ones at the right time, but it is a company that is remarkably good at burying its failures. The G4 Cube is the most obvious example, possibly the AppleTV and, to a much lesser extent, the Mac Mini are set to join it.

@the-person-who-is-pretending-to-be-Phreaky:

That doesn't even sound like Phreaky. He's doesn't usually swear and his vitriol is traditionally strongest against Apple users. So it seems odd that he'd suddenly admit to being one.

Hal Dace

Continuity

Well it's good news that he's in improving health.

Nevertheless, every company has to think about continuity, and ensure that there is a depth of leadership able to run with what is best in the organisation.

The last thing they want is to go Sun's way, and replace the charismatic (if irritating to some) leader with a Web 2.0 fanboy who confuses slogans with strategies.

Webster Phreaky

@AC re: phreaky

"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."

I've just changed my name to Webster Phreaky to see if it'll allow multiple people with the same name.

If this comment appears with Webster Phreaky as the author then that's a bit pants.

Webster Phreaky

iCard

I'll send him an iCard wishing him all the best.... hold on, can't do that because Apple STOPPED ICARDS when they changed .mac to mobileme!!!!!

david bates
Alert

Im suprised no-one has commented...

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.

Ascylto

@ David Bates

How uncommonly apposite is your name, Master Bates!

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: @ ScientologyIsACult

Although I don’t disagree that Sculley made a mess, but who brought him to Apple? Jobs – and it was him who persuaded Sculley that not knowing anything about technology was no problem him being the Apple CEO… it was all about the marketing (What was the thinking? Apply the Pepsi taste test to computers?). Of course, the goodwill didn’t last long and maybe if Jobs hadn’t acted quite the petulant child and not acted as a disharmonious force within the company, before flouncing off maybe Sculley’s stewardship of the company wouldn’t have set up so many long-term problems.

With regards to Amelio (and why no mention of Spindler?), although the guy wasn’t a powerhouse, he was brought in to sort out Apple’s finances and – according to him – Jobs merely continued with the plans he had started. What isn’t in dispute was that Amelio did return the company to profitability… there was a massive loss towards the end of his time of his company, but arguably this is partly because of various plots to take over the company, such as the person who denied he wanted the top job, but unloaded all his stock save one share…. Now who could that be? Losses did continue after he left, though.

Amelio says that a lot of the credit Jobs took for turning around Apple, should have gone to him… well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? However, some have made the point that a project like the original iMac wouldn’t have been started and completed between the time that Jobs came back and the product was launched. Very likely the work started in Amelio’s time.

One mistake that Amelio did make was paying for too much for NeXT… but I can’t quite remember who sold it ;)

Evil Graham

Oh noes! Two Websters!

Is that like matter and anti-matter? If they meet, will the world implode or something?

Anonymous Coward
Paris Hilton

Is this the end, when two worlds collide?

"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.

TeeCee
Dead Vulture

Re: Webster Phreaky

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

I need a drink.

Anonymous Coward
Happy

@ TeeCee

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.

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