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Apple Disclosures About Jobs To Face SEC Review
suraj.sun writes "US regulators are examining Apple Inc.'s disclosures about Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs's health problems to ensure investors weren't misled, a person familiar with the matter said.
The Securities and Exchange Commission's review doesn't mean investigators have seen evidence of wrongdoing, the person said, declining to be identified because the inquiry isn't public. Bloomberg News reported last week that Jobs is considering a liver transplant as a result of complications after treatment for cancer, according to people who are monitoring his illness."
If Jobs is going to have one he'd better get in line, as I hear that Larry Hagman has all available ones claimed.
Sig this!
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aDL78iMCdOzk
(its a question mark, not a quote mark...)
copy the url, look at it, does it look 'right' to you? ;) usually its a question mark as the first delim char before the parms.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Apple Disclosures About Jobs Said to Face SEC Review (Update2)
By David Scheer and Connie Guglielmo
Jan. 21 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. regulators are examining Apple Inc.'s disclosures about Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs's health problems to ensure investors weren't misled, a person familiar with the matter said.
The Securities and Exchange Commission's review doesn't mean investigators have seen evidence of wrongdoing, the person said, declining to be identified because the inquiry isn't public. Bloomberg News reported last week that Jobs is considering a liver transplant as a result of complications after treatment for cancer, according to people who are monitoring his illness.
Investors have been pressing for information on Jobs's health since June, when he appeared noticeably thinner at an Apple event. The company's stock whipsawed this month after Jobs, who battled pancreatic cancer in 2004, said he would remain CEO while seeking a "relatively simple" treatment for a nutritional ailment. Nine days later, Jobs said he would take a five-month medical leave after learning his health issues were "more complex."
"The good news flipped by the bad news makes one wonder what Apple knew," said James Cox, a law professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. "It's not surprising for the SEC to come in and look afterward, given the pressure and publicity regarding their handling of a lot of cases," such as criticism of the SEC's response to Bernard Madoff's alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme.
SEC spokesman John Nester declined to comment on the Apple inquiry. Steve Dowling, a spokesman for Cupertino, California- based Apple, declined to comment.
Apple will report first-quarter earnings after the market close today, followed by a conference call at 5 p.m. New York time.
Shares Rose
Apple's shares rose 4.2 percent on Jan. 5 after Jobs said he had been diagnosed with a hormone imbalance that caused him to lose weight throughout 2008 and "that has been robbing me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy." It was the first public disclosure of Jobs's health since August 2004, when he revealed he had undergone successful surgery to remove a neuroendocrine islet cell tumor, a rare, slow-growing type of cancer that affects as many as 3,000 people in the U.S. annually.
Before today, Apple stock had dropped 8.4 percent since the company disclosed Jan. 14 that Jobs, 53, would be on medical leave through June. The shares added $1.58, or 2 percent, to $79.78 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading at 9:31 a.m. New York time.
Apple has declined to provide specifics of the illness and Jobs said he won't comment further about his health. "Why don't you guys leave me alone -- why is this important?" he said in a telephone interview with Bloomberg News on Jan. 16.
Definitive Answers'
To bring any case, the SEC would probably have to show the company tried to benefit by withholding information about an unambiguous diagnosis, said Peter Henning, a former federal prosecutor and SEC lawyer who now teaches at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit.
"It would be difficult, and certainly a new area of the law," Henning said. "You would have to pin down exactly what they knew, and with a health issue -- unlike a merger or a decline in revenue -- it's not subject to definitive answers."
Corporate governance experts say shareholder interest in Jobs is unusually high because he is considered synonymous with Apple. He returned as CEO in 1997, turning the once-unprofitable maker of Macintosh computers into a successful consumer- electronics company with the iPod media player and iPhone. Jobs established himself as the face of Apple, serving as the main pitchman at every major product announcement over the past decade while yielding little time to other top executives.
"Steve Jobs himself thinks the Steve Jobs mystique is of value -- otherwise, why not have other people introduce those products over the past 10 years?" said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, associate dea
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Looking at the 3 month chart they are moving almost exactly with the market and are down about 2% less then the NASDAQ composite over that time period. Over the 1 year period they are down about 12% more than the NASDAQ composite but the movements are mostly market tracking.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'll tell you what, Mr. SEC Investigator, you do a really good job sniffing out wrong-doing in the Mortgage Crisis (and that means severely pointing fingers at Congress) as well as demanding transparency in the oil trade business and I'll let you bitch about Apple.
I have to side with Jobs himself, on this one. People just need to leave him alone, and stay out of this media crusade to "get to the bottom of what's ailing him".
The ONLY reason people are worked into a frenzy (and even got the SEC involved) in Apple's case is because of the intense focus on Steve Jobs as THE man behind Apple.
(My mom is friends with a guy who went through chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer, very similar to what Jobs had. Even though he was initially doing well, they discovered some of the cancer cells had metastasized to his liver, and about 4 years later, he's looking at a possible liver transplant. So *if* Bloomberg's report is accurate -- I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is the REAL story with Jobs' health right now.)
Nonetheless, it's not doing investors or the company any good to keep harping on it, and perpetuating the idea that Apple can't function without Steve in charge!
He's not going to live forever, even if it turns out this whole thing was made up as an excuse for Jobs to give himself a 6 month vacation! There has to be a "plan B", and any decent CEO has certainly given that some thought.
IMHO, Steve Jobs already served his main purpose for Apple. He rescued the company from a downward spiral, completely revamped the product line from top to bottom and turned it into one of the biggest tech success stories out there. He set Apple on a course of being a media distributor as well as a "computer company", and extended that to the cellphone marketplace too. If nobody out there can work with THAT, after it's handed to them on a silver platter? Well, I'm not sure America has any future in tech at all!
Jobs not doing keynotes and Apple announcing that Jobs took a leave of absence is Apple trying to clue investors into the fact that more then one person works at Apple. It's investors that think otherwise, not Apple putting it's eggs in one basket.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Just leave him alone! He's suffered enough, can't you all see that. Just leave the poor guy alone.
In any case, this SEC thing seems sort of silly. The SEC while it has the power to abusively coerce responses, techincally Jobs is just he CEO, not a golden child. How can his health issues be any more important than those of head of tupperware or American Toyota, who's name you don't know.
Is it because you know his name that makes his health techincally relevant? Then what about some who's names you do know, like Jack Welch, or Larry Ellison. Should they have been given annual public proctology exams since that's a high cancer risk for men their ages?
Sure the cult of Steve is an importnat phenomena to apple, but it's not a techincal criteria that I can see. It's not like Apple is somehow misrepresenting it's products or it's book value or it's liabilities to it's shareholders.
So what does the SEC have to argue here.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
So, let's say Jobs needs (I guess his doctors would decide if he needed it) a liver. Where does he get it? I mean, in the U.S., the scarce organs available for transplant are decided (I think) by some medical board that determines the medical usefulness(?) of the organ to the patient. That is, will it help the patient live a substantially longer, healthier life.
I don't think that they take into consideration the person's wealth or any other measure of that person's *value* to society. So, even if billions of dollars of market capitalization are at stake and millions of customers depend on his brilliance, he may be turned down for say, a 16 year old girl who has her whole life in front of her. I could be wrong though, there may be some provision for "importance" to society. Anybody know the answer? (Of course the medical board's answer may be different from what you think it should be!)
Now, living as I do in a third world country, I can see how Jobs could easily fly here and "procure" one if he needed it. (I'm not saying that he'd take one from a living person of course, just that he would get bumped up to the front of the line). Wouldn't look too good for Apple's image to so openly go around the American system but he would save his life (and presumably Apple). I'm afraid to say that as an Apple fanboy I'd rather him do that than die.
I'm a PC.
Not like the rest, the others. Everyone around me. I was at odds with my society and knew it early since birth. Unlike them, I did not "Think Different!"--the mantra of the Macs around me, the phrase on all the billboards in the city that served as a reminder to its citizenry. Sameness pervaded the essence of my being and no amount of self-conditioning I did could change that. Eventually, I gave up and isolated myself emotionally from society.
I gaze at the faces going by, the white earphones contrasting their black turtlenecks, connecting their ears to their pockets, their blank faces engrossed in hip Indie rock music and various garage bands. I envied them for their perfection against my flaws and my compulsive nature to expand, to burden my life with troubles instead of remaining, like them, simple and easy to deal with. The grandest of virtues, simplicity... the philosophy by our loyal benefactor Steve Jobs, who descended from the heavens, creating the Earth, the iron, the wind and the rain. Steve Jobs, who defined the parameters of existence, the one who set about the patterns of reality, the constants, the variables. He who made gravity, electromagnetic energy, and shaped atomic structures and brought forth motion. From these things, he crafted the elements, processed them, refined them, and from these things engineered Apple products through the purity of his mind. Each Apple product was individually crafted by his own hands with the programming code used to run each device having being compiled in his brain and uploaded to each device telepathically, breathing life and perfection into each and every unit.
Except, it seems, for me, for I was not among the many. I was a PC. They were Macs. I've always been a cold, stiff person. I got by, disguising myself by keeping my non-Ipod music player safely out of sight, which I use because of my depraved nature demanding more functionality than the simple and easy-to-use Ipods have to offer... In the safety of my own home, behind locked doors, I ran a Forbidden, a contraband computer from more depraved, earlier days that was not given the love and blessing of being birthed by Steve Jobs. I dual booted, out of the great sin of curiosity-- curiosity, a shameful value of a PC, as curiosity has no place where simplicity matters most--using two of the great unutterable blasphemies-- something called "Windows Vista" and something else called "Linux." Although, as I mentioned before, although my tendency to be a PC and towards conformity has always been inherent to me, I was truly transformed when I found these old things in a hidden cache of computer parts predating The Purging. Perhaps the greatest sin of all, the single evil that, if discovered, would damn me forever, was the fact that my mouse had more than one button.
As I walked on among the Macs on the streets, passing the Starbuckses as I went along, I wondered how it all came to this. I glanced at The Holy Marks on the foreheads as the people wandered down the streets, the Bitten Apple tattooed on all our of us at birth, and wondered if, perhaps, there could be something more to life. But again, this was a PC's thought, and not, like everyone elses', a Mac's. We were to hold ourselves to the philosophy of Steve Jobs--so as his products were designed for idiots, so too were we to be idiots. But I was not a Mac--I was not an idiot. I was simply too complicated to be a worthwhile person.
Nature called. I found a nearby public iPoo--squeaky clean and shining white, things weren't all bad--and let myself go, expelling the waste that had accumulated inside me. After relieving myself and committing the overly-complicated and thus illegal act of wiping my ass (I did not flush as iPoos, designed to be idiot-proof, did not flush) I left and once again wandered the streets aimlessly, hoping to find some meaning in a world where I simply did not belong, a world where if my true nature was discovered, I would be endlessly persecuted by smug, self-righteous sons of bitches.
This story is complete bullshit. The implication's that SEC rules have been broken is bullshit. The Bloomberg story that is referred to has already been widely debunked as complete and utter bullshit. Using a person's health as an investment talking point is bullshit ... you have no idea what the state of his health is, you have no idea how that will affect the state of his health in the future, and further, you have no idea what the effect on Apple would be no matter what the outcome.
What makes this even worse is that any self-respecting nerd knows full well that Mr. Jobs above all other people in the tech industry has imbued his company with its own self-sustaining and unique culture. He could announce that he is taking up sailing like most billionaires and no longer has time to work at Apple and there will still be people at Apple trying to figure out how to remove more buttons from all of their products. There would still be customers because there will still be creative people who need fonts that work and color management you can rely on and a full pro audio subsystem, and Web developers who want to run Apache/PHP/Photoshop, and there would still be poseurs who buy only for the logo and teh shiny. In other words, you have to be truly ignorant of computing to think that Steve Jobs has been sitting in a room at Apple drawing up MacBook Airs on a napkin and that the whole thing would grind to a halt without him.
Plus, Apple has a huge lead in 21st century computing that everyone would love to have. Google, Nokia, Palm, and Blackberry all use Apple's WebKit as their Web rendering engine ... MPEG-4 is a standardization of Apple's QuickTime format ... the iPod has 75% market share. Right now many people outside Apple are just beginning to use stuff that Apple has been expert at for years. It is obvious they are the only organization with the technology and expertise to do a proper tablet, which is just an iPod touch HD. All that is required is to complete the resolution-independent user interface, which Mac OS X has had in developer preview mode since 2004.
The smart investor is buying Apple stock right now. They are so undervalued because investors don't understand how to read the subscription accounting that is done for the iPhone.
I hope you did more research for the rest of the 'facts' in your post.
He was correct. MPEG-4 did adopt the QuickTime storage format. It was huge news at the time, because Microsoft had been pushing hard to have the committee adopt their proposal, and was quite upset that they lost out to Apple. I think the quote you referenced was simply referring to Apple adding support for the complete standard, codecs and all that.