So it does indeed appear that Steve Jobs has returned to his CEO position at Apple. Whether part-time or full-time may not be terribly clear, but perhaps it doesn’t make much of a difference these days. You see, the real question is how much effort Jobs has really put into the company over the past five years.

In 2004, for example, Jobs temporarily relinquished his CEO duties when he underwent surgery for treatment of a rare form of pancreatic cancer. The day-to-day affairs of Apple were managed by COO Tim Cook, who is regarded as perhaps the best operations person in the business.

When Jobs took his six month medical leave early this year to prepare for and receive a liver transplant, Cook took the reins of command again, and evidently acquitted himself surprisingly well. He was confident, and Apple’s steady stream of new product introductions appears to have continued unabated. Sure, it’s certain Jobs was still being consulted via email and telephone (or iChat) for the big decisions, but it’s not as if Apple suddenly ceased to function.

Indeed, after the company’s stock dipped for a spell, it managed to bounce back to a fairly decent degree, although it’s been down recently, perhaps in response to those liver transplant reports.

The key here is that, since taking over the company over a decade ago, Jobs has filled the executive ranks with people who are not only supremely talented, but clearly in lockstep with his vision for the company. What this means in the long haul is that he probably doesn’t have to micromanage each and every decision and outcome on a day-to-day basis, thus freeing his time for more visionary pursuits.

After suffering from a serious illness, surely Jobs feels his mortality, and perhaps he would want to spend more time with friends and family, which would also go towards reducing his actual role at Apple.

Some suggest that he is grooming Cook to become the CEO in truth and not just via his regular duties. Should that be the case, Jobs could restrict his involvement to the big decisions and the public appearances, and otherwise conserve his energy as much as possible.

Once again, it’s fair to say that I’m speculating here. I’m just looking at the play of events to reach these conclusions, as I do not pretend to have top secret sources to get me information. I don’t think it’s all that difficult to judge much of what Apple is doing by their public acts, although there penchant for secrecy remains largely unaltered.

In the scheme of things, of course, I suppose our hunger for news, even of an extremely personal nature, is one of the reasons why there’s so much curiosity about Jobs these days. No other corporate executive, except perhaps Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, can routinely generate headlines in the mainstream media, even though Jobs is far less visible on the public stage.

For those who follow Apple and care about their products, the important thing is what the board of directors is doing about the situation. Without releasing details, they supposedly have a succession plan in place, and one hopes they have demonstrated appropriate corporate responsibility and kept close tabs on their CEO’s condition and survival prospects. If they haven’t, well stockholders would have a right to complain.

On the other hand, I think there would be far less concern if Apple would have been a little more forthcoming about the matter. Yes, an executive’s illness would usually be a private affair, but not an executive who has, whether he wants to or not, become the tech industry’s rock star. The ongoing silence simply inflames the situation, and it also encourages the rise of unfounded rumors. You can see, for example, how that fake rumor that Jobs suffered a heart attack a couple of years back caused the stock price to tumble really fast.

In my not-so-humble opinion, Apple would do far better to have provided periodic updates about Jobs rather than single sentence brush-offs. I also rather suspect that his name was attached to the press release about selling more than a million new iPhones in order to restore confidence in the company and reassure everyone that Jobs is back or would be shortly.

On the other hand, a press photo showing a healthy-looking Jobs appearing for his first day of work would do wonders to still the concerns and the unfounded rumors. The way the media works these days, saying nothing only delivers more attention.

Perhaps that’s Apple’s real plan. By being secretive, they simply attract more attention. They don’t have to ask the press to come to them. They’re attracted like flies seeking little tidbits of information and speculation. If that’s the plan, well, they’ve clearly succeeded, for better or worse.

And by the way, I have to wonder about a certain media pundit who wrote an article as to whether Steve Jobs is fit to run Apple. That is the question that should have been asked about the CEOs of certain auto and financial companies instead, since Apple is successful and some of those other companies aren’t.

Ahead of this past weekend’s introduction of the iPhone G3 S, some analysts who should know better tried yet again to speculate upon how many units Apple would sell through Sunday. Most of the numbers were in the half million range, but were expanded to as high as 750,000 after AT&T announced they had receivedseveral hundred thousand preorders before the weekend madness.

As usual, the analysts were all wrong.

As you’ve heard, Apple reported over one million units sold through weekend number one, and that doesn’t include the $99 iPhone 3G. In fact, their official press release covering the announcement included quotes from Steve Jobs, still the CEO, despite what some analysts have also suggested.

Of course, the precise figures won’t be known until the latter part of July, when Apple holds its quarterly financial conference with analysts and details the numbers, more or less. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Jobs himself appeared just to show up the folks who thought he’d never return. Of course it doesn’t mean he’s putting in a 40 or 50 hour work week, but if he’s there for the key decisions, that ought to be sufficient to silence most of the skeptics.

As far as those industry analysts are concerned, they have always tended to underestimate Apple. I am not about to suggest this is some sort of deep-seated plot to make Apple look bad, although it does seem some media people have that agenda. But consider some of the false statements spread over the years.

One notable example occurred in 2007, that Apple failed to sell one million iPhones as planned the first weekend the new smartphone went on sale. This claim, after months of advance publicity, was designed to make Apple look bad. Worse, Apple never made any advance prediction about expected sales. They generally don’t do such things, so the analysts who suggest success or failure on that basis were already completely wrong.

Despite the positive developments and the clear indications that Jobs is back at Apple, the company’s stock price dipped Monday. However, that may be more the result of Wall Street’s pessimism over the state of the global economy than the financial shape of any single company.

But if you look over the experience of past years, you’ll see a tendency of the financial community to underestimate Apple’s sales and profits. I can’t tell you how often I’ve used the phrase “beat the street” in reporting on Apple’s quarterly financials. What concerns me most is why those alleged financial experts can’t seem to get it right about Apple, and why their numbers tend to be on the low side of the ledger.

You see, it’s not as if they traditionally deliver conservative figures for other companies. A number of tech firms, including such large players as Dell and Microsoft, are known to miss expectations from time to time. Sometimes they even beat the estimates, which leads you to believe that the analysts are behaving in a fair and balanced fashion.

Why not Apple?

In part, it seems that a lot of members of the media and financial community still view Apple as the beleaguered computer maker of the mid-1990s that was losing market share and bleeding red ink. Some analysts had an Apple death wish in those days, where they’d repeatedly pronounce the company dead and buried, even though it never seemed to happen.

The false claims about an Apple Tax are recent examples of regurgitating old news. At one time you paid a lot extra to buy any Apple product. Even though the company still makes great profits on its gear, you can’t say the iPhone is overpriced, nor iPods. When it comes to Macs, I suppose you can consider the fact that Apple doesn’t play in the entry-level sandbox, and thus there are no $599 Apple note-books to be had. But if you actually compare the hardware and the software, Apple almost always comes in at a competitive price.

The recent price reduction on most Apple note-books may actually make Macs cheaper in some respects. At the high end of the ledger, Dell seems to be unable to figure a way to sell one of their workstations for less than a similarly outfitted Mac Pro. Indeed, Apple’s professional model is often hundreds of dollars cheaper.

Between now at the release of the next quarterly financial report, you will be reading a number of stories as to just how well Apple is surviving in the midst of worldwide financial chaos. Even a small dip in sales can be considered a tremendous success. But there are positive developments. Apple is shoring up the current quarter with the early introduction of a new iPhone. The price cuts for the note-books will also reflect a potential sales boost. Whether sufficient to compensate for apparent sales dips earlier in the quarter is anyone’s guess.

As the date of the release of those financials comes closer, you’ll see various and sundry estimates as to the actual numbers Apple will report. As usual, when it comes to Apple, they’ll be dead wrong!

Although the crowds weren’t quite as large this weekend, it does seem as if hundreds of thousands of new iPhones were sold. AT&T along claims several hundred thousand preorders, and there were unknown numbers from Apple before the 3G S was released on Friday. By Sunday, however, the truth was out there. Steve Jobs himself, still Apple’s CEO, reported over one million units sold, way ahead of analyst estimates.

This time, Apple and its wireless carrier partners acted in an intelligent fashion. By taking preorders, they didn’t force customers to wait hours in front of the store in the hope they wouldn’t be too late to get a spanking new iPhone 3G S.

For the most part, the activation issues that plagued customers last year didn’t occur, although there were some instances where the final activation process seemed to take far longer than it should. However, the complaints shouldn’t be near as voluminous.

When it comes to the iPhone 3.0 software update, Apple was smart enough to make it available two days earlier, to give the early adopters plenty of time to clog Apple’s servers. Well, it really wasn’t so bad. I downloaded my copy not five minutes after it became available, and there was no delay in retrieval. The update was uneventful for the most part.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

I really find it humorous to read some of the chatter about Apple Inc. that suggests they were forced kicking and screaming to slash prices on their uber-expensive note-books at the WWDC. The theory goes that Apple looked at the sales reports and concluded that potential customers were rebelling at paying an Apple Tax, particularly in a down economy. So they went back to their number crunches, pulled out their calculators or whatever, and decreed that they must make their products cheaper to keep sales moving along at a good clip.

Now maybe some of this is true. Certainly one reason why Mac sales have flattened is the price of admission. However, as I’ve long contended, this alleged Apple Tax is a largely a fiction created by Microsoft and its PC box building partners. In saying that, though, Apple isn’t the sort of company that looks at the current financial quarter and regards it as the beginning and end of their business, as some of the other PC makers seem to do.

Instead, Apple has to consider the long-term impact on any decision they make. That’s the sort of DNA instilled in them by Steve Jobs and his crew of executives over the years. Certainly most corporate leaders are starting to feel that the economy has more or less bottomed out and that things will get better from here on.

That said, Apple is engaged in its annual back-to-school promotion, where students can get free iPods and the usual educational discount on their new Mac hardware. At the same time, building more units results in cost reductions for each of them. Component prices are also down, particularly solid state drives. Add all that together and it’s quite possible Apple decided that they could still earn their required 30% to 35% profit margins on the revised MacBook Pro lineup at lower price points.

Understand that I never thought Mac note-books were particularly overpriced even at the original cost of admission. I know that some of you will persist in attempting to demonstrate how the $1,500 PC portable is the equivalent of what used to be the $1,999 MacBook Pro. But now that the latter is $1,699, the arguments have even less affect on me.

What remains to be seen, though, is whether Apple has reason to give desktops a similar treatment. Sure, the March upgrades really gave you a lot more value for the same price. That’s particularly true of the $1,199 20-inch iMac, which is near as capable as the previous $1,499 version. You could say Apple did deliver a $300 price cut. It might have been nice to see a $499 Mac mini and a cheaper Mac Pro also, but I have no idea what they cost to produce, since they sell in far lower volumes. Or at least that’s what the evidence appears to indicate.

With the iPhone, the original development expenses for the iPhone 3G were no doubt amortized long, long ago. It shares its case and a very few parts with the 3G S, the cost of flash memory is down, so selling it at a subsidized price of $99 is just the ticket. Now when a customer comes into an AT&T dealer, or an Apple Store, seeking a low-cost smartphone, they now have another hot contender costing not much more than those so-called “free” or “free after rebate” alternatives.

Sure, they will have to pony up extra money to cover the requisite data plans and such, but that’s not normally a serious factor when someone considers a low-cost option to help them get with the plan, as they say.

With Snow Leopard, a $29 upgrade price is so fundamentally logical that there’s little to argue about, as far as I’m concerned. It is not a major feature upgrade, except for the addition of Microsoft Exchange support, which is great for Macs in the business world. The under-the-hood changes will, over time, yield great speed boosts, but how many people buy a new operating system strictly on the promise that it is faster? In addition, those 100 “refinements,” features or whatever you choose to call them might have justified a full upgrade price, but I still think many would be skeptical.

Besides, it’s in Apple’s best interests to move most of the Mac user base to Snow Leopard as quickly as possible. For those with a PowerPC still chugging along, Apple hopes they’ll just buy new Macs. Indeed, in light of Snow Leopard’s requirement of an Intel-only Mac, you can just bet that more and more developers will ditch PowerPC support over the next few months.

Now whether or not my suspicions are correct will probably not be fully confirmed until Apple releases is financials for the current quarter in the latter part of July. Then I can say “I told you so” or you will have the ammunition to demonstrate that I was way off base. But I’m quite confident that I’m on the right side this time.

Of course, we don’t want to let facts get in the way as far as some media commentators are concerned. They prefer to repeat the conventional wisdom of a decade ago in describing Apple’s products rather than observing the new reality.