Steve Jobs: Birthdays, Awards, Contest Calls, Shareholder Meetings, and iPhone 3.1.2

Apple CEO Steve Jobs turned 55 this week according to TUAW, so we’ll start off by wishing him a healthy, happy, peaceful, and prosperous birthday! What do you get the man who gave us the Apple II, Mac, Pixar, iPod, iTunes, Apple Retail, iPhone, and iPad? Well, a couple of awards aren’t a bad place to start…

MWC and Jim Henson Awards

While neither Apple, nor the iPhone were at Mobile World Congress, Macworld reports Steve Jobs still won their award for “Mobile Personality of the Year”. (Stephen Fry accepted on his behalf).

Macworld also tells us Jobs received a Jim Henson Company Award/Celebration Honor for reflecting “the core values and philosophy of the legendary Jim Henson and the company he founded.”

Calling all iTunes $10K Winners

While not winning awards, Steve Jobs has been personally calling the winner of his own contests — in this case the man who won the 10 billionth iTunes song download. Rolling Stone got the details:

Sulcer first thought was that he was being pranked. “He called me and said, ‘This is Steve Jobs from Apple.’ I said, ‘Yeah right, I have a son that loves to play tricks and he does that every now and then — calls me and imitates somebody.” After three or four times of asking “Come on now, who is this,” Sulcer realized that his caller ID read simply “Apple,” and only then did he believe that he was the winner of the contest and a $10,000 iTunes card.

Apple Annual Shareholder Meeting

Jobs also ran Apple’s annual general meeting, fielding questions in classic style according to Business Week. On why Apple needs a $40 billion war chest:

“We know if we need to acquire something — a piece of the puzzle to make something big and bold — we can write a check for it and not borrow a lot of money and put our whole company at risk. The cash in the bank gives us tremendous security and flexibility.”

In defense of Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, now resigned from the Apple board:

“Eric conducted himself as a board member appropriately and recused himself whenever discussing matters that might involve conflict.”

Macworld caps it off with a response on what keeps him up at night:

“Shareholder meetings,” Jobs quickly quipped, before giving the meeting a cold splash of reality.

“Apple requires stability in the world. People aren’t going to worry about which laptop to buy if they can’t afford dinner, can’t afford to send their kids to school, can’t afford textbooks. There are things much bigger than us that are out of our control. So we try to just do the best we can.”

iPhone 3.1.2

Amazingly, Steve Jobs managed to do all this, according to 9to5mac, while still rocking iPhone 3.1.2. That’s the older version of the iPhone OS updated a couple of weeks ago to 3.1.3. (We too were hoping he at least would be on iPhone 4.0 by now!) This was determined by looking at the email headers in a response he sent to an Apple customer concerned about developers let go on the Final Cut Pro Team:

No worries. FCP is alive and well.

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