To celebrate Steve Jobs’ official return to Apple (AAPL) this week, Kobi Shely has posted a YouTube clip from MacHEADS, his 54-minute “fanboy documentary” on the cult surrounding the company and its charismatic CEO.

Shely wrote, directed, co-produced and edited the film. The 2-minute 22-second segment he selected is centered around the return of Jobs to Apple in Dec. 1996 after he was ousted in a boardroom coup nearly a dozen years earlier.

The clip includes rare footage from the July 1998 keynote in which a younger, chubbier Jobs announces Apple’s return to profitability and introduces the first iMac.

It’s worth a look, if you can ignore the first 15 seconds of computer-generated weirdness, the bizarre Church of Mac segment in the middle and the young woman stroking and kissing her computer at the end.

The clip is pasted below. The full movie is available on iTunes and Amazon Video on Demand. Or you can order a DVD here.

Below the fold, a two-minute trailer for MacHEADS that includes sex columnist Violet Blue’s priceless line: “First of all, I’ve never knowingly slept with a Windows user. Ever.”

See also:

• Top 10 moments in Steve Jobs’ career
• Film: Inside the cult of Mac

Technology’s most closely watched chief executive is officially back on the job, according to an Apple (AAPL) spokesman.

“Steve Jobs is back to work,” chief spokesperson Steve Dowling told CNN.com. “He is at Apple a few days a week and working from home the other days. We’re glad to have him back.”

Jobs, who is recovering from two major surgeries — one to remove a tumor from his pancreas nearly five years ago, the second a transplant performed two months ago to treat end-stage liver disease — was scheduled to return from a six-month leave of absence before the end of June.

Apple’s share price took a hit after news of the liver transplant appeared in print on June 20, but the stock has recovered since.

Jobs was spotted on Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., campus a week ago — walking on his own without cane or wheelchair — but it was unclear whether that was a one-shot appearance or the beginning of a more normal work schedule.

Today’s statement suggests that he will be more present — and more deeply involved in managing Apple’s affairs — than many analysts suspected.

Apple COO Tim Cook has been running the company in Jobs’ absence and has won high marks Apple watchers for his steady hand.

No new photographs of Jobs have surfaced since his return (the one here was taken in June 2008). Until last week, he had not been seen in public since he hosted an Apple event in Cupertino last fall.

As I see it, Apple’s crack public relations team stage-managed the news last week of Steve Jobs’ liver transplant pretty well on its own, somehow making it appear in the Wall Street Journal after the markets had closed for the weekend and in the middle of what was probably the company’s biggest product release of the year.

By the time Monday rolled around and traders could react to the fact that what Jobs had initially described as a hormone imbalance was actually end stage liver disease, Apple was able to soften the blow with the news that it had just sold 1 million new iPhones.

The stock took a 3.9% hit — dropping from 139.48 to 134.01 in the space of two days. But by then Jobs had been spotted back on Apple’s Cupertino campus walking on his own — without cane or wheelchair — and his surgical team had declared that he was “recovering well” with an “excellent prognosis.”

But there’s nothing to help you forget the illness of one celebrity like the passing of an ever bigger one, and when Michael Jackson died on Thursday, all bets were off. The flood of searches on Jackson’s name just before 3 p.m. PDT (6 p.m. EDT) was so abrupt and intense that at first Google thought it was under attack.

Meanwhile, interest in Steve Jobs, as gauged by Google Insights, flatlined, and pressure on Apple’s shares lifted. Whoever was shorting Apple (AAPL), it seems, had moved on to better things.

The stock closed Friday at 142.44, higher by 2.52 points than it opened on Monday.

See also:

• Steve Jobs, the sickest patient on the waiting list
• Inside Steve Jobs’ liver transplant
• Steve Jobs: Apple sold 1 million new iPhones
• Steve Jobs is back at Apple

Michael Jackson photo: Rusty Kennedy/Associated Press; Steve Jobs photo: Getty Images

After three days of ducking the press — and telling the Wall Street Journal that Steve Jobs was not listed as a patient there — Methodist University Hospital in Memphis finally admitted Tuesday that Jobs did in fact receive a new liver at their transplant facility.

It the process, the faith-based hospital revealed more than we knew about just how sick Apple’s (AAPL) CEO had been.

With Jobs’ permission, Methodist’s chief transplant surgeon, Dr. James Eason, issued a four paragraph statement designed to counter the impression — apparently widespread — that Jobs had jumped to the top of the transplant waiting list on the strength of his wealth and celebrity.

Judging from our comment stream, most readers believe Jobs’ new liver should have gone to someone who had been waiting longer, needed it more or had a better chance of survival.

Eason flatly denies that. His statement reads, in part:

“Mr. Jobs underwent a complete transplant evaluation and was listed for transplantation for an approved indication in accordance with the Transplant Institute policies and United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) policies.

“He received a liver transplant because he was the patient with the highest MELD score (Model for End-Stage Liver Disease) of his blood type and, therefore, the sickest patient on the waiting list at the time a donor organ became available. Mr. Jobs is now recovering well and has an excellent prognosis.”

This is revealing.

MELD is the numerical measure used by transplant centers to assess the severity of chronic liver disease. It was developed to predict the odds that a patient will die within three months based on a scoring system that ranges from less than 10 (4% mortality) to 40 or more (100% mortality).

The MELD algorithm takes values from the patient’s blood and urine tests and spits out an answer. In a hospital’s computer, it looks like this:

Where

• INR, or international normalized ratio for prothrombin time, is a measure of how fast the patient’s blood clots
• Bilirubin levels tell doctors how well the patient’s liver is functioning
• Creatinine levels provide a measure of the patient’s kidney function
• Dialysis treatments, which do the work of the kidneys, affect creatinine readings

We don’t know whether Steve Jobs was getting dialysis twice a week, but if his MELD score was higher than every other liver transplant candidate with his blood type in Tennessee — which has a relatively short waiting list but still averages 48 days — he was very sick indeed.

Jobs had a cancerous tumor removed from his pancreas in 2004 and went on a medical leave January to deal with continuing health issues that he initially described as an easily treated hormone imbalance.

Although he was spotted on Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., campus Monday, his spokespeople continue to say only that Jobs looks forward to returning to Apple at the end of June.

See also:

• Inside Steve Jobs’ liver transplant
• Why does Steve Jobs look so thin?
• Steve Jobs takes a medical leave
• Steve Jobs, chained to a rock

He’s back.

According to CNBC’s Jim Goldman, at least two Apple (AAPL) employees have told him they saw Steve Jobs at the company’s Cupertino, Calif., campus on Monday.

Jobs took a medical leave in January to deal with what he initially described as a hormonal imbalance, but which was apparently serious enough to require a liver transplant.

For nearly six months, Apple spokespeople would say only that they looked forward to their chief executive returning to Apple before the end of June.

He seems to have made it back to One Infinite Loop with more than eight days to spare.

Jobs was quoted early Monday in a press release announcing the sale of more than 1 million iPhone 3GSs. It was his first public statement since Jan. 21.

That press release also signaled a typographical change in the name of the new iPhone — from 3G S to 3GS — a small but welcome improvement in which some Apple watchers thought they saw the master micromanager’s hand.

It’s not clear yet whether Jobs’ appearance Monday was a one-time thing or if he is planning to come back to work full time.

Apple has not yet returned a request for comment or confirmation.

UPDATE: USA Today reports that Jobs has been in contact with Apple employees in the past few weeks via e-mail and Reuters says one of its reporters spotted Jobs leaving the campus Monday:

“[He was] dressed in his trademark black turtleneck and jeans. He walked out chatting with another person before climbing into a black car that then drove off.”

It’s hard to know which is more significant: Apple’s (AAPL) announcement that it sold more than 1 million units of the new iPhone 3GS last weekend — easily exceeding analysts’ estimates  – or the fact that the news was accompanied by a quote from CEO Steve Jobs, his first since Apple’s Jan. 21 quarterly earnings results.

“Customers are voting and the iPhone is winning,” said Jobs. “With over 50,000 applications available from Apple’s revolutionary App Store, iPhone momentum is stronger than ever.”

The same press release announced that six million copies of iPhone 3.0 were downloaded in the first five days after its release last Wednesday.

Earlier Monday several analysts had released their estimates of the 3GS’s weekend sales, including …

• Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster: 750,000 units (see here)
• Kaufman Bros. Shaw Wu: 600,000
• Oppenheimer’s Yair Reiner: 400,000 – 500,000

Jobs, who usually gets the first quote in any Apple press release, had been noticeably absent in these releases since his medical leave began. His reappearance — or at least the reappearance of words attributed to him — two days after the Wall Street Journal reported that he was recovering from liver transplant surgery, may signal the first stage of his return to Apple, scheduled to occur before the end of June.

UPDATE: In an addendum to his Monday morning report to clients, Piper Jaffray’s Munster notes that Apple’s weekend sales not only exceeded both his initial prediction (500,000 units) and his adjusted estimate  (750,000), but they matched last years sales — despite the fact that the new iPhone launched in just 8 countries vs. 21 countries last year.

UPDATE: Make that 1 million. See below

Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster issued a report early Monday that may draw some attention away from Steve Jobs’ health and put it back on the bright and shiny object Apple (AAPL) released last Friday.

Munster and his team spent the day counting heads and conducting interviews with customers buying the new iPhone 3GS in New York City and Minneapolis. Among their findings:

• 750,000 iPhones. Munster estimates that Apple sold about 750,000 new iPhones over the three-day weekend, 50% more than his initial prediction (500,000) but 25% less than the 1 million iPhone 3Gs Apple sold on launch last July. It took Apple 74 days to sell 1 million first-generation iPhone and three days to sell 1 million units of the iPhone 3G.
• Shrinking windfall. Among the 256 customers surveyed, 28% were switching carriers to AT&T (T), down from 38% last year and 52% in 2007. AT&T’s iPhone windfall is shrinking.
• Brand loyalty. 56% were upgrading from an old iPhone, up from 38% last year. “We believe this shows Apple is developing brand loyalty not enjoyed by other mobile phone makers,” Munster writes.
• 16GB sweet spot. 43% bought the high-end 32GB iPhone 3GS, down from the 66% who bought the high-capacity model (16GB) last year and the 95% who chose 8GB over the 4GB when the first iPhone went on sale.
• Business users. Among customers buying their first iPhone, 12% were switching from a Research in Motion (RIMM) BlackBerry, up from 6% last year. This, says Munster, “may indicate the company is making headway among business users slowly adopting the iPhone platform for corporate use.”

Munster maintains a buy rating for Apple with a price target of $180 a share. The stock closed Friday at 139.48, up 2.6%, before the Street learned that Steve Jobs is recovering from a liver transplant.

UPDATE: Four hours and fifteen minutes after Munster issued his report to clients, Apple announced that it had actually sold more than 1 million units of the iPhone 3GS by Sunday, selling as many iPhones in eight countries as it sold in 21 last year. See here.

See also:

• Munster: 500,000 iPhones this weekend
• Live from the (relatively sedate) iPhone 3G S launch
• Inside Steve Jobs’ liver transplant

When major news breaks, like the report that Steve Jobs’ got a new liver, there’s always a scramble among competing reporters to find what they call the second-day lede — an angle they can use to spin the story forward (”lede” is by tradition deliberately misspelled).

Our modest contribution Saturday was a medical piece describing the liver transplant procedure, but there were plenty of other threads to follow. Here are the second-day stories that got our attention:

• Where was Steve Jobs hiding? Leander Kahney, former managing editor of Wired.com and author of Inside Steve’s Brain, did some first-rate legwork and identified what he believes is the Memphis mansion where Jobs has been convalescing. You can trace the detective story at his Cult of Mac blog and even take a Google-map street view drive down the cul-de-sac where Kahney thinks Jobs spent much of his six-month medical leave.
• Who leaked the story? Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, remarking on how unusual it is for the Wall Street Journal to run a front page news item without offering any information about its source, suggests three theories: 1) A healthcare provider, without Jobs’ permission, 2) Apple’s (AAPL) public relations department, with Jobs’ permission, or 3) someone on Apple’s board of directors, without Jobs’ knowledge or permission.
• Did the press get played? Several reporters are pursuing this. The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple believes Apple moved up the release of the iPhone 3G S from mid-July to mid-June in order to draw attention away from Jobs’ health problems with “a bright and shiny object.” Joe Wilcox’s “Steve Jobs’ Return Is Still Vaporware” takes it one step further. “The timing,” he writes, “helps protect Apple’s share price and deemphasize an important fact: Steve isn’t really coming back this month.”
• Where are the Memphis media? Rex Hammock pointed out that 12 hours after what should have been a huge local story, no Tennessee newspaper or TV station had done anything with it. I can confirm that 30 hours after a New York City paper broke the news, there was nothing about Apple or Steve Jobs on the websites of the Memphis Daily News, the Memphis Commercial Appeal or the the Memphis Flyer. The Memphis Business Journal’s site does have a Steve Jobs item, but it’s just their “Partner News” link to a Fox Business story.

It says something about the state of the news media today that it was a blogger in San Francisco, not a reporter in Memphis, who seems to have tracked down Steve Jobs’ Tennessee whereabouts.

If you spot an interesting second-day story, let us know and we’ll add it to the list.

See also:

• Inside Steve Jobs’ liver transplant
• Steve Jobs’ health status in 13 words
• Why does Steve Jobs look so thin?
• Steve Jobs, chained to a rock

On Friday the Wall Street Journal reported, without indicating its source, that Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs underwent a liver transplant operation in Tennessee about two months ago.

This would seem to confirm a report in mid-January that Jobs — who had a tumor removed from his pancreas in 2004 and took a medical leave earlier in January to deal with continuing health issues — was considering such an operation, as well as rumors in mid-April that he was having the surgery in Memphis.

Two hospitals in Memphis are designated liver transplant centers: Le Bonheur Children’s Medical Center and Methodist University Hospital. Le Bonheur does not perform liver transplants on adults. A spokesperson for Methodist told the Journal that Jobs was not listed as a patient there, which leaves open the possibility that he was registered under another name.

About 6,000 liver transplant operations are performed in the United States each year at more than 100 hospitals, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network, but the waiting list for donors is considerably shorter in Tennessee than it is in most states.

The operation usually takes five or six hours. The surgeon makes a large incision in the upper abdomen and removes the damaged liver by cutting all the attached ligaments and severing several vital ducts and vessels, including the common bile duct, the hepatic artery, the hepatic vein and the portal vein that carries blood to the liver from the spleen, stomach, pancreas and intestines.

Blood from the liver is replaced by an ice-cold solution until the organ can be replaced.

The new liver — usually rushed from a recently deceased donor in the kind of race against time regularly featured in TV medical dramas — is then placed in the empty cavity and attached to those vessels and ducts. [A growing percentage of hepatic transplantation procedures, as several readers have pointed out, are partial liver transplants from living donors.]

Recovery can take many weeks and the survival rate is good. 80% to 85% of patients live for at least a year; about 75% live for five years or more. (Recent studies report that the five-year survival rate at experienced transplant centers is over 90%.) To prevent rejection, most patients take immunosuppressive drugs for the rest of their lives.

Liver transplants are well-accepted treatments for end-stage liver disease and acute liver failure. The situation with Steve Jobs, who is recovering from a rare form of pancreatic cancer — called islet cell neuroendocrine tumor — may be a different story, as a key passage in the Journal piece suggests:

William Hawkins, a doctor specializing in pancreatic and gastrointestinal surgery at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., said that the type of slow-growing pancreatic tumor Mr. Jobs had will commonly metastasize in another organ during a patient’s lifetime, and that the organ is usually the liver. “All total, 75% of patients are going to have the disease spread over the course of their life,” said Dr. Hawkins, who has not treated Mr. Jobs.

Getting a liver transplant to treat a metastasized neuroendocrine tumor is controversial because livers are scarce and the surgery’s efficacy as a cure hasn’t been proved, Dr. Hawkins added. He said that patients whose tumors have metastasized can live for as many as 10 years without any treatment so it is hard to determine how successful a transplant has been in curing the disease. (link)

If Jobs’ cancer did spread to his liver, the fact that he had this procedure suggests that it may not have gone any further. Most hospitals will not perform a transplant on patients with metastatic cancer that has spread outside the liver.

Apple continues to say that it looks forward to Steve’s return to Apple at the end of June, which is 10 days away. It has not yet returned a request for comment on this report.

Transplant image courtesy of Tulane Medical Center.

See also:

• Why does Steve Jobs look so thin?
• Steve Jobs takes a medical leave
• Steve Jobs’ health status in 13 words
• Steve Jobs, chained to a rock

“We look forward to Steve returning to Apple at the end of June.”

How often have you heard that? A Google search for the exact phrase turns up roughly 400 instances, most of them attributed to Apple (AAPL) spokesman Steve Dowling, who is nothing if not disciplined.

The sentence is a variation on the last line of Steve Jobs’ Jan. 14 memo to his staff, the one in which he announced that he was taking a six-month medical leave to deal with health-related issues. “I look forward,” he wrote, “to seeing all of you this summer.”

The phrase “look forward” is useful, because it gives you deniability if something goes wrong. Dowling incorporated the phrase into his stock answer and has been using the statement — without a word out of place — ever since.

Ask him or any other Apple executive about the health of their CEO and they’ll invariably reply with those same 13 words: “We look forward to Steve returning to Apple at the end of June.”

I mention this because as the end of June approaches, hardly a day goes by without some journalist hearing this sentence and reporting it as news.

The latest example: Mike Harvey, technology correspondent for the London Times. His 675-word story, filed Friday and widely picked up by other news outlets, begins like this:

“Steve Jobs will return to work at Apple at the end of this month, it was confirmed today…”

And how was this “confirmed”?

By a spokesman who told Harvey: “We look forward to Steve returning to Apple at the end of June.”