What if Steve Jobs ...

... doesn’t appear on stage at “Let’s Rock” Tuesday? 

     Monday’s drop in Apple shares will look like nothing.  Even if Steve does appear, you can bet his every word, every phrase, and every wrinkle will be noticed, worried, and speculated on.

    Last June, there was talk because Jobs looked kind of wan and thin as he announced the 3G iPhone.  The chatter eased after he called The Times’ Joe Nocera and talked off the record. Nocera wrote, “While his health problems amounted to a good deal more than “a common bug,” they weren’t life-threatening and he doesn’t have a recurrence of cancer.”  That was in July.

    Then, a few days ago Fake Steve Jobs’ creator Dan Lyons, fanned the embers.  In e-mail to MacSoda.com, Lyons said, “People close to (Jobs) have been saying ... he’s really sick.”

    I’m just saying that the speculation about Tuesday’s Apple event is missing the elephant in the room.  It’s not whether there’s a slimmer, wide-screen Nano ... or an Apple TV 3.0 that acts like a Tivo.  It’s whether Steve is OK.  And as an ecstatic Mac user, and shareholder who bought last week, now down 11 points, that’s my concern.

    Analyst Gene Munster issued a note this afternoon on this concern.  The Piper Jaffary analyst said he expects Jobs to make the "Let's Rock" presentation. “We are confident that Steve Jobs will be presenting and we anticipate his appearance at the event to be viewed as a positive,” Munster wrote, as repoiryted by Philip Elmer-DeWitt on his Apple 2.0 blog.