#FF00AA

I’m really puzzled by the number of people, and pundits, who don’t believe that Steve Jobs will present tomorrow’s Apple keynote. Seems like they fail to realize — or take for granted — that skipping this event would be like officially announcing his retirement. And if he was the kind of guy to retire and stop being the public face of Apple, don’t you think he’d have done that before he lost so much weight that nobody could talk about anything else? What would be the sense of stepping slowly away from the spotlight now that the damage is done?

The consensus on the last This Week in Tech was that his presenting the keynote would detract too much attention from the real announcements. Well, yeah, so?! By all accounts, nothing important will be introduced tomorrow (no, I don’t care about the Beatles); so what better time could you imagine to just put Steve on stage and let everyone revel in his nondeadness? It doesn’t matter how thin he is or isn’t; much better for him to appear publicly now, rather than steal the focus from the tablets when he actually does announce them. I know he doesn’t want to acknowledge that his health has become a public topic, but he’s not stupid, either; he knows he needs to show himself, and if he weren’t going to do the very next keynote Apple would already have released some very detailed photographic evidence that he’s back at work.

Unless he’s preparing to retire, you’ll say. We’re talking about Steve Fucking Jobs, I’ll answer, and I’ll probably call you a moron because that’s the way I roll. He went through his first cancer treatment without officially stepping down; he only did so when he had to go through a goddamn transplant, for just a few months, and even then he reportedly spent a good deal of his time supervising Apple’s R&D from home. Now he’s back at Infinite Loop, and you expect him to hide behind the curtains? Nonsense. Just nonsense.

As for the announcements themselves:

• I accept the common assumption that it isn’t the right time for the tablet.

• Like I said, I don’t care about the Beatles.

• I don’t see the point of discontinuing the Shuffle; no matter how cheap the Nano gets, the Shuffle will always be dirter-cheaper and have its place in the lineup.

• I think killing the Classic would be insane, but I don’t discount the possibility. There will always be people who want to carry their entire library in their pocket, and the option that would really make sense would be to replace the Classic with a hard-drive–based Touch. And the name change could satisfy Apple’s trigger-happiness with the product kill-switch, but I’m not holding out that much hope.