It’s often said that no one man is bigger than the company they work for, but Steve Jobs undoubtedly comes closest to dispelling that. This is why, when Jobs announced he would be temporarily stepping aside on grounds of health for the second time in the last few years, everybody kept a close eye on Apple Inc.’s stock the next morning.

Apple Inc.’s quarterly earnings calls have become the technology sector equivalent of a mad, rich old man laying in a bathtub of money on his front lawn, loudly counting each individual note as passers-by shake their heads in bemusement.

It has emerged today that Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs is to take a second leave of absence on medical grounds. In his place, Apple’s COO Tim Cook will take over the everyday running of the world’s most expensive consumer technology company.

ack in the halcyon days of 2008, when the iPad was still a glimmer in Steve Jobs’ eye and Verizon iPhone rumours were only just starting, Apple filed for a trademark on the term “App Store”, its newly launched marketplace for iOS Apps.

If there’s one constant in the technology world, one complete, over-arching universal truth known by all, it is that events don’t come any bigger than Apple keynotes. Once the black turtleneck, jeans and New Balance are on stage, you better be listening.

Verizon have been all over CES this week, touting the speed of their 4G network and showing off the shiny new handsets that will be taking advantage of it. So it raised a couple of eyebrows when invitations started arriving in tech journalist’s inboxes announcing a press event in New York on Tuesday.

It’s five years from now, Steve Jobs’ health issues have re-surfaced, and he no longer wants to run Apple. His declining health means his personal life now takes priority over his empire, so he does the unthinkable (or the logical for most normal people), and decides to retire.

Want an iPad for Christmas? Well rumor has it that you should hold off two months because the iPad 2 will purportedly hit shelves within the next 100 days.

In what could see the coming together of two of the scariest media empires in the world, rumours reach us that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Apple have been secretly collaborating on a tablet-based newspaper called The Daily, and it’s set to launch early next year.

Boy, it must be quarterly earnings season! Hot on the heels of Google, Apple and Nokia’s earnings calls, Microsoft has released some figures of its own – and they’re not half bad!