The latest piece of second-hand gossip about Steve Jobs’s health from “a previously reliable source” (who, of course, cannot be named) provoked a (temporary) drop of 4 per cent in Apple’s share price. Even as I write, business reporters are frantically tapping out speculative articles on the subject whether Apple could survive the demise of its charismatic CEO.

There’s something deeply neurotic, nay pathetic, about this. It’s the journalistic equivalent of that mysterious phenomenon, “stock market sentiment”, which is just a fancy way of describing the way a flock of sheep acts when one of its members fancies that she might have seen a wolf.

That’s not to deny that people and personalities matter. Steve Jobs brought Apple back from the dead: he took a company that had become incoherent and gave it a sharp focus. He then helped it to re-invent itself. If he hadn’t returned from NeXT and Pixar when he did, Apple would now be just a fond memory, or perhaps just another trophy acquisition of HP like Compaq and DeC.

Similarly, without Bill Gates in the 1980s Microsoft would never have become the ferocious, paranoid, single-minded corporation it was. It became, for a time, literally a corporate extension of its co-founder’s weird personality. And indeed that fact nearly caused its break-up in the Netscape anti-trust case, from whose consequences it was saved only by a fortuitous change in the US Administration.

But that was then and this is now. If Steve Jobs were to die or to stand down because of ill-health, Apple would undoubtedly be affected (and its share price would undoubtedly fluctuate). But it’s a different outfit now from the demoralised one that Steve rescued. It’s a much more mature company — indeed, like Microsoft, it’s approaching corporate middle age. It more or less owns the online music business. It’s on its way to doing the same in video downloads. And it is causing havoc in the mobile phone business which — if the industry isn’t careful — it will also come to dominate.

So while Jobs would be a big loss to Apple — and an even bigger loss to the feature writers and columnists who feast on the Reality Distortion Field that surrounds him — I’ve no doubt that the company would weather the storm, just as Microsoft survived the departure of His Billness to the charity business.

The Register believes in getting its celebration in first…

In two short months, Apple’s Macintosh will turn 25 years old. My, how tempus doth fugit.

To mark the awesome inevitability of January 24, 2009 following January 24, 1984 after exactly one quarter-century, tech pundits will bloviate, Apple-bashers will execrate, and Jobsian fanboyz will venerate the munificence that flows unabated from The Great Steve. The din will be deafening.

To avoid the crowds, we at The Reg decided to go first…

At the moment, Apple has $24 billion in cash reserves. Shouldn’t be surprised if they were up to $25 billion on the anniversary.

Hmmm… Just finished reading Tom Junod’s profile. A bit contrived and over-written. And it concludes lamely by asking what peaks remain to be scaled by Jobs now that he has transformed the mobile phone business? “Well”, Junod writes.

there is the “cloud,” as it’s known in geekspeak — the treasure trove of our disembodied data, the digitized version of ourselves that exists beyond ourselves, the next step in the virtualization of the human experience. It’s being posited as the basis of a mobile Internet, or what some people call “a new Internet,” but its lure is the lure of finding a way out of our bodies and into the invisible, and that’s the oldest of human dreams. And so, while everybody else wonders how to get there, how to gain purchase on the ether, Jobs, with his iPhone, offers the same possibility he always has, the possibility of getting there one glittering box at a time. But his soul is in those boxes; it’s never been unlocked, and the service he introduced at the June keynote — a service called MobileMe, which staked his claim on the invisible, or at least announced his readiness to compete for control of it — was deemed, upon its launch a month later, a “disaster” . . . “a failure” . . . “Apple’s worst product launch in the ten years since Jobs returned from exile.” The digital ether would seem as uncongenial to Steve Jobs as heaven itself. But still it beckons, and still he has to answer its call. What other choice does he have? He is already halfway there.

From TechCrunch…

There may only be over 12 million iPhones in the wild, but that hasn’t stopped iTunes users from downloading more than twice as many apps as songs during the store’s first two months of availability, according to a report.

Steve Jobs said at Apple’s press event last week that users have now downloaded over 100 million apps. Assuming it maintains the same rate of 70 million app downloads it witnessed in August alone, it could hit 1 billion apps by the end of the store’s first year of availability, sometime in 2009. iTunes song downloads didn’t hit the 1 billion mark until its second year of availability.

But in reality, 1 billion downloaded apps could happen much sooner than the middle of next year. As apps become a key selling point for Apple going forward and more iPhones and iPods get out into the wild, more users will find reason to download apps and in turn, increase the download rate…

Another confirmation of John Doerr’s investment acumen.