As much respect as you can have for Apple you have to understand they are in a difficult place as their CEO is irreplaceable and probably does not want the details of his health spread to the mainstream media. Unfortunately this combination of factors makes it clear that you may not be able to trust the Apple PR machine when it comes to decisions surrounding the company’s participation in trade shows and really anything to do with the health of Jobs.
For weeks we were lead to believe that the company’s decision to pull out of MacWorld had nothing to do with the health of Jobs. Now the about face.
It is little wonder than journalists are taking matters into their own hands and speculating Jobs had Whipple Procedure, a rare surgery performed to treat cancer. To give you an idea of the frequency, about 100 of these surgeries happen to be performed at the Mayo Clinic annually. In the procedure, surgeons remove the head of the pancreas, most of the duodenum (a part of the small intestine), a portion of the bile duct and sometimes a portion of the stomach. After the pancreatoduodenectomy, the surgeon reconstructs the digestive tract. Not surprisingly, one of the side-effects of the procedure is weight loss or “dumping” and coincidentally hormone therapy is used to help patients who have gone through the procedure gain weight.
I just hope Jobs gets better soon so he can get back to work. The world will be a much worse place if Steve Jobs is not able to drive Apple to develop better products while driving the competition to do better just to keep up.
In the mean time, take Apple’s PR related to Jobs with a few grains of salt.
