Apple made some surprise announcements about next week’s Worldwide Developers Conference on Tuesday. Cementing the idea that there will be no hardware announcements, the keynote will focus on Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud (remember, though, Apple does not discuss unannounced products) and will be delivered by CEO Steve Jobs.
Now might be a good time to hark back to a few months ago, when all the idiots of the world were talking about how Steve Jobs only had six weeks to live. So, OK, we’ve learned that you can’t diagnose how long someone has to live by looking at a picture of them. Good to know! Sadly, there goes the Macalope’s idea for a healthcare website called Sick or Not, which would have been Hot or Not meets WebMD. Oh, well. Maybe stressing the importance of actually examining people will save some lives. Or at least stop some publicity-hungry doctors from saying stupid things to tabloid journalists.
That you can’t tell someone’s health from a picture was apparently news to Wall Street, as Apple shares were up after the announcement.
Financial publications such as Fortune and Barron’s are attributing the rise not to iCloud or iOS 5, but rather the plan for Apple CEO Steve Jobs to speak at the keynote.
Sigh.
This really just makes the Macalope sad. Because it backs up his anecdotal evidence that the reason Apple is undervalued is based almost exclusively on fears about Steve Jobs’s health.
While the Macalope isn’t denying that great things happen under Jobs’s direction, we’ve also got plenty of evidence that the company rolls along just fine without his day-to-day attention. That Jobs’s mere presence at WWCD can cause a 10-point uptick in Apple’s stock price says more about the nervous nellies on Wall Street than it does about Apple’s viability.
By the way, anyone who complains about Phil Schiller’s delivery should put themselves in the shoes of an an Asus user for a day.
[Disclosure: the Macalope holds an insignificant number of Apple shares.]
[Editors’ Note: In addition to being a mythical beast, the Macalope is not an employee of Macworld. As a result, the Macalope is always free to criticize any media organization. Even ours.]