Fungible Convictions

The battery for my Macbook Pro completely died—I can only get a 10-minute charge of out it—just days after my warranty expired. It was a frequent problem with batteries from a particular batch.

So this morning I called up Apple customer service and found out that a new battery would cost $129. So I did what Consumerist always suggests and asked flat out what I could do to get it for free. The friendly rep put me on hold for a minute to talk to a superior and came back with my full customer history and said, “It looks like you’ve been a customer with us for about four years, so we’re going to go ahead and wave that charge.” All I have to do is make sure to send the old battery to Apple, presumably so they can confirm it’s defective and make sure it doesn’t end up in a landfill.

Me = happy customer.

It’s pretty despicable when large news outlets argue that minor hiccups at Apple might have something to do with the CEO’s health. Their argument is that Apple is misleading investors by not releasing Steve Jobs’ health record (Jobs is a survivor of pancreatic cancer) after Jobs looked “dramatically thinner” at recent appearances.

There’s a visceral disgust at covering a company this way. Then there’s this from the Wall Street Journal:

The dearth of information has led investors to do their own digging over the years. In 2004, one hedge fund hired private investigators to tail Mr. Jobs to hospital appointments in the hopes of figuring out how sick he was, said a portfolio manager at the fund. Eventually, he said, Mr. Jobs “seemed to catch on,” and became harder to track.

Why is it disgusting? . . .

Because the privacy of one’s own health status is sacrosanct. Just ask Americans who lived under Roosevelt.

And practically speaking, what difference does a non-disclosed health condition have on a company’s performance? If that’s what investors are focusing on, doesn’t it mean they haven’t properly valued the company’s succession plan for any hardship that might hit a company’s leadership? For an investor to demand that Jobs make his health record publicly available is admitting that that investor has no idea what the company is actually worth should something unexpected happen. Countering that stalking Jobs to his doctors appointments is therefore good business sense turns every CEO into a means to an end. That might make sense in the short term, but to convince every CEO that their own humanity is worthless is a bad long bet.

Man, it makes me wish actuaries invested my money.