The story got big because hordes of tech reporters, including Goldman himself, noticed Jobs's sickly appearance at the iPhone 3G launch. Katie Cotton, who as best we can tell is Jobs's personal flack on Apple's payroll, tried to deal with them by telling them Jobs simply had a "common bug." It was an obvious lie and it only added mystery to an already juicy story Apple shareholders had every right to understand. If Jobs is looking to blame someone other than himself, Cotton makes a convenient target for his famous wrath.

Apple's secretive ways have paid off for it in turning every product release into a marketing event. But by applying that same Kremlin-like opaqueness to its corporate affairs, Apple has gone astray. "By claiming Mr. Jobs had a bug, Apple wasn’t just going dark on its shareholders," Nocera writes. "It was deceiving them."

It's one thing for Jobs to lie about Apple's unreleased gadgets — for example, when he publicly dismissed the notion of producing an iPod that played video in 2004, even as Apple was secretly working on one. That kind of maneuver can be put down to competitive misdirection. But to extend it to the health of a public company's CEO? Unseemly.

As unseemly, really, as the Apple apologists among us who join Apple PR in repeating the mantra that Jobs's health is a "private matter". Wishing doesn't make it so. With Jobs personally accounting for a quarter of Apple's market cap, it's everyone's concern.

Apple's fans have a choice: They can join Jobs himself in insulting award-winning reporters like Nocera, and dismissing the whole affair. Or they can face reality: Steve Jobs let his personal flack lie for him — and they bought it. That must really bug them.

Cotton's title is vice president of worldwide corporate communications at Apple. But her real job is serving as Apple CEO Steve Jobs's personal flack. Always at Jobs's side, Cotton puts Jobs's interests ahead of Apple's — sometimes quite literally, like when she took time away from Apple to handle PR for Disney's acquisition of Pixar, where Jobs was CEO but where Cotton did not work. The Pixar deal may have been good for Jobs personally — he is now one of Disney's largest shareholders, and a board member there — but it's not clear how the interests of Apple shareholders were served by Cotton's extracurricular efforts.

After Jobs's gaunt appearance at the announcement of the iPhone 3G in June sparked questions about his health — including speculation that his cancer might have returned — Cotton had an opportunity to lay out the facts: Jobs's pancreatic surgery in 2004, while successful, was not without complications. Removing part of the pancreas requires a rewiring of the digestive tract. Weight loss is a common side effect, as food rushes undigested through the body. That matter can create blockages, which in turn can lead to infections.

That seems like the most likely explanation for what happened to Jobs before Apple's World Wide Developers Conference: He suffered a blockage which lead to an infection, requiring treatment.

Instead, Cotton told reporters that Jobs had a "common bug" and had been taking antibiotics. Not exactly a lie, but far from the complete truth — her phrasing was obviously meant to suggest Jobs had some kind of cold. In fact, he had to have a surgical procedure to address the problem, the New York Times recently reported. Hardly a "common bug."

Cotton is obviously serving her boss's obsessive need for privacy. But in an age when we ask presidential candidates for their medical records, is it too much to expect a company like Apple to provide basic, accurate information about its CEO's health — especially when billions of dollars of Apple's market value are attributed to Jobs himself?

Cotton should remember this: She doesn't actually work for Steve Jobs. She works for Apple's shareholders. If it's too late for her to start doing her job accordingly, then it's time for her to go.

(Photo by Violet Blue))

Pogue attempts to pack the supposed evenhandedness of a gadget review into his song-and-dance routine, with tiresome results. And in the end, all you remember is the disgraceful spectacle of a Timesman bawling at the top of his lungs, "I want an iPhone!" Gee, David, we thought a call to Apple PR chief Katie Cotton would have scratched that itch a long time ago.

"Dontcha," by contrast, captures the most essential point about the iPhone: It turns its owners into monsters, imbuing them with a false sense of their own importance and sex appeal. The spectacle of geeks attempting to rap and perform dance hip-hop moves perfectly captures the inflated sense of self the iPhone lends. The video, directed by recent L.A. transplant Nora McDevitt, has a cast of microstars: Randi Jayne, the force behind "Valleyfreude" and sister of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg; David Prager, COO of online-video startup Revision3; and Irina Slutsky of Geek Entertainment TV. (Jayne, Prager, and Slutsky also produced the video.) Jayne, in particular, shines, getting the Britney Spears wind-machine treatment as she disses the Sidekick, the Razr, and other cell phones that just aren't as hot. It almost — almost — made me want to buy one, something the endless Apple hype parade has yet to achieve.