Apple COO Tim Cook is just the latest to receive a benevolent gesture from El Jobso. Apple’s CEO, who struggles by on a salary of $1 per year, has decided to give Cook a bonus of $5 million dollars and a bunch o’ stock (At today’s price of $226 that’s another $17 million, ahem) for not destroying the company doing a good job while Jobso was out on sick leave hiatus.

The generosity of Steve Jobs is staggering.  He creates wonderful devices like the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad..and then allows us to buy them! He gives underlings trusted members of his team enormous bonuses. Tim who?

Yet he scrapes by on a buck a year. And in Silicon Valley, that won’t last long.

Gandi could have learned much from Steve Jobs.

Is this device's demise immiment?

past glories orphaned by Apple

When the Macintosh was launched in 1984, it was not an immediate success. It took a good while to catch on. Apple’s big seller up to early nineties was the Apple II line of computers. And what was not to like about the Apple II? It was expandable, user-friendly, programmable, tons of software, great support – then Apple pulled the plug to focus on the Mac line of computers. Nothing but the GUI and mouse from now on. Tim Cook has now now tipped Apple’s hand that the Mac may now be on it’s way out in favor of mobile devices such as the upcoming iPad and of course it’s popular iPhone/iTouch line up. If you thought the outcry for the demise of the Apple II was huge – this is going to be a tsunami. This will probably be a very slow phase out, like say three to seven years from now, depending “conditioning” of market.  If Apple gets out of personal computing hardware market in favor of mobile devices, that could mean OS X might be made portable to non-Apple PCs for programming purposes – I can’t imagine doing any useful programming work on the iPad without hooking up the peripheral keyboard (COSTS WAY EXTRA) right off the bat. And Apple likes to control the users (and programmers) experience very rigidly.

Being the benevolent dictator that he is, El Jobso allowed COO Tim Cook to speak from a carefully prepared and approved script at Goldman Sach’s tech confab in San Francisco. Get the live blogging details here. Below, Dear Leader shows Cook how short the leash is.

Silicon Alley Insider reports that Apple COO Tim Cook may be in line for the top spot at GM.  Key quote: “He’s also clearly in line for the (Apple) CEO slot when Steve Jobs decides to relinquish it.”  Relinquish?  Clearly ridiculous.  El Jobso is Dictator for Life. Hasn’t Nicholas Carlson read Options?

Remember earlier in the year when Dear Leader had to leave the planet for awhile? Well, Tim Cook remembers.  The Apple COO stepped into the temporary leadership vacancy and piloted the ship admirably. So much so, that he got a smidge over $12 million in Apple stock for his troubles. Photo shown below courtesy of  TUAW, with El Jobso preparing to mind meld with Cook, to give him infinite wisdom, patience, clarity, and clothing tips.  (A black turtleneck, Tim.  Not a polo.  OK?)