Nocera: Apple and Jobs can no longer be trusted

Joe Nocera, the New York Times business columnist who received a call last summer from Apple CEO Steve Jobs for an off-the-record chat about his health, now questions the company’s motives with the announcement that Jobs was taking a leave of absence to deal with his health issues.

Nocera writes, “Last week, when Steve Jobs announced that his recent weight loss was due to ‘a hormone imbalance,’ I got calls from reporters and others (which, I must admit, I ducked) asking me if that was the medical problem he had confessed to when he and I had had our infamous phone call last summer — the one where he called me a slime bucket and denied that he had a recurrence of cancer. The answer is no, it wasn’t. It was something else — which of course I still can’t disclose because the conversation was off the record.

“I said at the time that I knew I was being spun by Mr. Jobs. But I didn’t think I was being lied to. Now, I’m not sure what to think. It is certainly possible that he had the condition he described to me last summer. It is also possible that he did, in fact, have ‘a hormone imbalance,’ as he announced last week, as rumors swirled again about his health. And it is even possible that a few days later he discovered that his problems were ‘more complex’ — whatever that means — and that he only just realized that he needs to take a medical leave. It is possible, in other words, that he and Apple are telling the truth.”

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