When Steve Jobs rolled out the Apple Macintosh computer in January 1984 he did so, true to form, by commissioning one of the most memorable TV advertisements ever created.
It bore several classic Jobs hallmarks. It was cool. It was darkly funny. And it seemed to portray a mindless conformity in Jobs’ supreme rival, Bill Gates of Microsoft.
Modeled on the George Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, it showed row upon row of gray-suited, gray-faced male automatons (read: PC users) sitting in front of a huge screen upon which Big Brother pontificates. A blonde woman in white and red running gear — Ms Apple by implication — hurtles toward him and hurls a mallet at the screen, which erupts into a fireball just as Big Brother is saying, “We shall prevail!”
Close observers of the ever more mysterious world of Steve Jobs will have remembered that ad this weekend with a wry chuckle. For, in the last few days, the behavior of Apple’s chief executive and his top team has become increasingly erratic, bordering on bizarre, with definite shades of Big Brother.
Over the weekend we learned that Jobs had a liver transplant two months ago. You could almost hear the sharp intake of breath among geeks everywhere, particularly in the west-coast techno-Mecca of Silicon Valley. At last there was an explanation for his gaunt appearance and evident weight loss, for his disappearances and for this year’s six-month break from work.
But consider the manner in which the news came out. It broke late last Friday night — that witching hour beloved of buriers of bad news — at the end of a day that had also seen Apple launch its latest iPhone. The Wall Street Journal had the exclusive and, unusually for them, ascribed it to no source at all, provoking a mass of blogger speculation that the source could only have been Jobs himself.
All that Apple would say on the subject was to repeat parrot-like the phrase that “Steve continues to look forward to returning at the end of June.” Big Brother would have been proud.
The news of the liver transplant was just the latest in a series of events that saw Jobs and Apple dig themselves deeper and deeper into a pit of secrecy surrounding his health. The first the world knew about his problems was in August 2004, when it was announced he had been treated for a rare form of pancreatic cancer.
Later it dribbled out that in fact the diagnosis had been made months earlier, in October 2003, and that he had tried initially to beat it with a peculiar dietary treatment (we’re talking about a Buddhist vegetarian approach here).
Earlier this year came the baffling claim that he had a relatively simply treated “hormone imbalance,” followed just days later by the announcement that Jobs would be stepping down for six months to focus on his health.
The relative news blackout over almost five years has prompted desperate attempts by Jobs’ devoted band of followers to reach the truth. Bloggers have tried to confirm that April’s liver transplant took place in Memphis, Tennessee, by tracking the movements of Jobs’ private plane. They have also pored over records of property transactions near the Memphis hospital that specializes in such treatments, to identify the mansion house they believe he bought while preparing for and recovering from the operation.
Why go to such extraordinary lengths to find out information that Jobs clearly prefers to keep private? Why does his health matter so much to anyone other than himself and his close family and friends?
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