Way back in the fall of 2001, when BoomTown was but a less-aged version of myself, I attended a keynote speech at the now-defunct Comdex show in Las Vegas, where Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates continued to bang the drum for one of his long-running obsessions: The tablet computer.

“The tablet takes cutting-edge PC technology and makes it available whenever you want it, which is why I’m already using a tablet as my everyday computer,” Gates said at the time to the audience gathered at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. “It’s a PC that is virtually without limits and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America.”

Well, that did not happen.

But Gates did keep his promise about using a tablet–he kept on doing so and also harping on the topic all the time, with Microsoft even releasing a giant tabletop Surface several years ago and supporting multitouch in the coming Windows 7.

I recall Gates talking about the idea of how important the tablet is on innumerable occasions, more than any single concept I can recall.

It is ironic, then, that all the hype has suddenly and firmly coalesced around the particulars of the tablet that Apple (AAPL) will be unveiling in the coming months.

And now that CEO Steve Jobs is back fine-tuning the whole shebang, the obsession has moved into overdrive, punctuated only by endless stories about every single new app for the iPhone and fights over some of those new apps for the iPhone.

It’s a complete aside, but how ironic is it that Apple has somehow managed to make Google (GOOG)–the Skynet of the Internet–seem like a victim over this Google Voice shrillathon?

Back to the Apple tablet, which is playbook hype for iconic computer giant.

Besides being a secret project everyone in Silicon Valley seems to know about, the coming device is enjoying full-on breathless reportage of every single possible button and every possible feature, with every single bit of functionality parsed, dissected, masticated and spat back out.

But let’s be honest–in the end, this Apple tablet is probably going to be some kind of giant, sleeker, more glorified and doubtlessly niftier version of the iPod touch, called the iTab or the iPad or the iAmSoCoolAren’tI?, at three times the price.

Now, as it turns out, Microsoft (MSFT) is also at work on a table device, this time called the Courier.

This development became known recently after a demo video of it in use was somehow “leaked”–three guesses about which software giant in Redmond, Wash., put that out, and the first two don’t count!–to Gizmodo.

It seems to be some kind of tablet mixed with a journal mixed with a day planner, with a hinged two-page look. Digital writing and a stylus are involved, but also lots of touchscreen action.

Well, I say, good for Microsoft, and perhaps for Gates, who has now mostly disengaged himself from the day-to-day particulars of the behemoth he built, including the Courier.

Nonetheless, in all likelihood, Apple will still garner the most buzz in this tablet faceoff and will, more than likely, sell more.

A delicious irony, given that in their fascinating and long-running rivalry, it has usually been Jobs playing the hopeless dreamer and Gates the one who makes bank from the dreams of others.

No longer, which should make this round between Microsoft and Apple the most interesting of all.

Speaking of dreaming of dreams, it is always a good time to post the video of Susan Boyle singing “I Dreamed a Dream”:

You knew it was coming, of course.

Since the blogosphere couldn’t actually kill him off–deeply lazy and incredibly wrong in insinuating that Apple CEO Steve Jobs was dying imminently–it turned around yesterday and declared him a liar for not saying he had a “hormonal imbalance” sooner.

Of course, Apple (AAPL) has also played along in this bizarre game, along with its defenders, who have all tried to pretend nothing is wrong with a man who clearly looks like he has had the stuffing knocked out of him because of his long-running health issues.

Still, the worst offender, of course, was the original story in Gizmodo by Jesus Diaz last week about Jobs’s keynote pullout from Macworld, using a single source for the report that Jobs was doomed.

In it, Diaz went well over the top by using this one source as confirmation that Jobs was “declining rapidly” and “it may be even worse than we imagined” and, quoting the source directly, “Apple is choosing to remove the hype factor strategically vs. letting the hype destroy Apple when the inevitable news comes later this spring.”

That sounds pretty bad to me. Inevitable, of course, always means taxes or death and dying. As in pancreatic cancer returning. As in start cuing the pallbearers. Get Marcus Welby, M.D., stat!

As it turned out, it was also a bit of a premature diagnosis by someone not a doctor but playing one on the Web, as Jobs countered the rumors with his own news yesterday in a terse letter that ended with the back of his hand to crepe-hangers like Diaz and his specious source:

“So now I’ve said more than I wanted to say, and all that I am going to say, about this.”

So it’s done, right?

Sadly, no, it is not.

Not satisfied to be utterly wrong about relaying on a rotten source and posting it with a screaming headline and declaring someone on death’s door and then finding that perhaps he had a breath or two still in him–remind me never to tell Nick Denton I am feeling nauseous or I will be on my way to the morgue pronto–Gizmodo tried to twist its original story into a shape even the the malleable corpse in “Weekend at Bernies” could not get into, and got it wrong a second time yesterday.

Under the new title, “Steve Jobs Skips Macworld Because of His Health,” the new post started: “Looks like our source was partly right: Jobs’ condition was the a reason for his Macworld no-show.”

Except Jobs did not ever say that in his letter, except to note: “A few weeks ago, I decided that getting to the root cause of this and reversing it needed to become my #1 priority.”

Does the mean he quit Macworld because of that alone?

I have no idea and neither does Gizmodo, which seems to still have done no actual reporting on this issue it makes such a big deal of. Instead, the post whips up implied guilt without a shred of real reporting.

It could be true, it could be false. But Diaz does not help us, except to just ask us to take his say-so. It’s profoundly simplistic and reeks of an agenda.

More importantly, here’s the problem with portraying the Macworld withdrawal as so cut and dried: At all corporations I have ever covered, big decisions are nearly always a complex mix of emotion and business and chaos.

To wit: It is well known Apple hates Macworld, and having to introduce a fabulous new product at a weird time too.

My guess–and that is all it is–as to what seems plausible: Apple had no wow products to show. Execs have wanted out for a while. Jobs felt lousy and wanted to try to get better. A confluence of events seems more likely than one big Apple plot.

But it did not stop Gizmodo from declaring it so, by egregiously reading into Jobs’s letter, as if it were tea leaves and Diaz was that wacky divination professor from “Harry Potter.”

As Hermione Granger said of her: Rubbish.

Then, worse, Diaz goes for the full pretzel, noting about the Jobs letter:

“What does this mean? First and foremost, that his health is not declining rapidly now, as our source affirmed. Thank god for that. Like I said in the original article, I hoped our source was wrong about this point, and they were. The source’s information was probably from earlier in the year.”

What? Earlier this year? Probably? This is a whole new kind of backpedaling.

Actually, when you boil it down to the really important issue, it was posting the information about Jobs being on his deathbed that was wrong, and no amount of fobbing off blame on the source can fix that.

All this could have been solved if Apple were more forthcoming, of course, but this is akin to wishing for a miracle cure.

Apple should be, obviously, although the company is also well-known for its secretive behavior, which continues to surprise people covering it, despite it being business as usual for almost its entire history.

And, as the Gizmodo follow piece does correctly point out, the Jobs-Is-Fine-and-Dandy reporting done by CNBC’s Jim Goldman (and clearly fed by Apple) also went too far in the other direction and oddly ignored the obvious signs of some kind of health issue.

And Goldman’s own claim later that he was sort-of right was just as silly. Neither he or Diaz seems to be.

Jobs is not well as Goldman claimed, but neither is he dying as Diaz said (Sorry, Jesus, I mean your source said, although you talked to that source, used the info, typed it in and let it fly.)

Now, as the professional mourners disperse, it remains to be seen how much longer this will go on. My guess is for a while, since the obsession with Jobs’s health seems infinite in its creepiness.

(I know the drill, it’s only mentioned constantly because it is all about Jobs’s value to the stock, and that is the reason for the intense attention still, even though even Martians have gotten the message about his troubled pancreas. Right.)

But here is one thing I do know for sure: In a letter he was forced to write, Jobs seem to have declared yesterday firmly that he still has a life.

Now, everyone else should get a life too and move on.

Now, it’s getting flat-out macabre.

That would be the continuing swirl of attention the health of Apple icon Steve Jobs has been getting.

Rumors of his impending demise have been popping up periodically since the too-thin crisis of the Worldwide Developers Conference in June and look like they won’t stop until it actually comes true.

My grandmother used to have a perfect rejoinder for this kind of funeral-chasing behavior, which was prevalent among her gang of Italian sisters, who–whenever anyone caught a cold–predicted the worst outcome: “Don’t be a crepe-hanger.”

This time, more rumors surfaced yesterday in Gizmodo, curiously, a week before the Macworld at which he is famously not appearing. The site used a single–yes, that’s right–source saying his illness and not Apple’s business troubles with the conference’s organizer, IDG, was the reason for his pull-out.

The rumor, of course, sent Apple (AAPL) shares into a tailspin for the day, before others–such as CNBC’s Jim Goldman–posted just-as-strong refutations of the Jobs-Is-On-His-Last-Legs stories.

Blogger Robert Scoble even talked to a worker at a yogurt store that Jobs frequents and got a health report (good!).

Oh, dear–yogurt workers as medical experts? What’s next? Brain surgery consultation from the Starbucks barista? This is what we’ve descended to?

It has to stop, because the fact of the matter is that Jobs’s health is still nobody’s business, as it has not been throughout this bizarre obsession with one man’s personal issues.

In a post in late July, the last time this issue surged, I wrote:

And after listening to all of the debate about it–mostly indignant declarations by the media, making their case mostly by wheedling milder indignant declarations from stock analysts and corporate tsk-tsk outfits–I have concluded that what is ailing Jobs is exactly no one’s business.

Even if his every breath is critical to the ongoing operations of Apple, the reason most use as their main argument for Jobs to tell all, it goes double.

Why?

Well, any Apple investor has to know by now that Jobs suffered from a rather serious bout with a curable version of pancreatic cancer some years ago and that recovery includes inevitable complications.”

And, indeed, the only decent argument you can make to focus so intently on Jobs’s health of any relevance is the impact on Apple company stock, which is self-righteously trotted out each time these specious reports emerge.

The thing is, a lot of companies have been run by execs with health issues (and countries too–VP Dick Cheney’s ticker has been misfiring for a long time now, for example, and he still seems to have been running the show with a verve we wish he perhaps did not have so much of now).

But, to be fair, I will acknowledge the issue. But if anyone does not get that Apple’s CEO has health issues by now, they are ignorant in the extreme. The situation should be baked into the stock price.

In addition, Apple is run by a lot of other competent people besides Jobs and they too are part of its success. Here’s a news flash–Steve Jobs does not conceive, manufacture and wrap every iPhone and iPod.

That is the kind of mythology that has, of course, been propagated a lot by Apple and it is–like a lot of things–a bit true in a bigger concept.

But, as I recently said, when Jobs inevitably leaves the company, probably on his own two feet in retirement, the Cupertino HQ will not suddenly be taken up to the skies as if it were the rapture.

Maybe the yogurt shop guy knows about when that’s going to happen.

Speaking of rapture, here’s singer Jill Sobule singing about that at a recent D: All Things Digital conference.

And, in a second video, she sings perfectly about how we should behave when it comes to what is inevitable for us all. People riveted by Jobs’s fate might do well to take her sage advice.

Here are the videos:

iPhone 2.0!

But until then, we might as well wallow in it.

So here is a funny report from Engadget about the imagined possibilities for the next cheaper versions of the iPhone. Many are, of course, already speculating on what’s next for the product, even before it hits the stores June 29, and some are saying that Apple is already at work on new ones.

Sounds like another good Saturday Night Live parody in the making, like this one:

The helpful Brian Lam of Gizmodo provides a daily “pill” of iPhone info, so I don’t have to, while MacRumors gives the lowdown on accessories (carrying case, carrying case, carrying case, pricey Bluetooth headset, blah, blah, blah).

Meanwhile, USA Today discusses the girding going on at AT&T stores as they prepare for the onslaught of buyers.

But you can’t miss this long article by John Heilemann in New York magazine, which ran on the cover with this picture and the line: iGod.

I am not so sure of that from the piece, which depicts Jobs as almost decrepit in his recent onstage appearance at the D5 conference, with Heilemann writing, “The senescence on display is jarring…”

That means Jobs-with-a-walker, I think.

I am not sure Heilemann actually attended our conference to see Jobs in action, but he looked pretty good to me up close in both his sessions–one alone with Walt and another with us both and also Microsoft’s Bill Gates.

Aside from being kind of busy over the last few years (along with a major illness), you be the judge of Jobs’s dotage in these two videos from D5: