Some days it seems like Steve Jobs will be CEO of Apple until he dies. But after a bout with pancreatic cancer and a health scare earlier this year, peope are starting the grieving process earlier. Part of that involves playing a guessing game about who will take his place. Fortune convincingly argues that Apple COO Tim Cook is the only real candidate.Cook is paid more than anyone else at Apple, and he's the only executive allowed an outside board seat (Cook is a director at Nike). More importantly, he's humble enough not to push for a CEO job that can never be his as long as Jobs is in the saddle. True, Cook is an operations expert, not a product genius like Jobs, but he could surround himself with Apple executives like Scott Forstall and Jonathan Ive to make up for that lack. Only one wild card: Mark Papermaster, the IBM chip executive whose recruitment by Apple has embroiled the companies in a lawsuit. if the hire goes through, Papermaster will report to Jobs, not Cook.

Apple COO Timothy Cook is the man most likely to replace co-founder and current CEO Steve Jobs according to Fortune.

At Apple's shareholder meeting today, Steve Jobs said the Apple board has many potential successors to choose from should something happen to him. "We've got great talent ... we talk about it a lot." Candidates include COO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer. Have you ever seen either of those guys talk? Jobs is said to be worth $16 billion in market cap to Apple. Apple PR could spend that much on media training for Apple's stiffs-in-waiting, and they still wouldn't fill the seats at a Macworld keynote. Our vote is for design guru Jonathan Ive, who'll shut up and let the gadgets speak for themselves.

Another rabid Apple fanboy has put down his Jonathan Ive-designed pom-poms. His complaints? Wholly predictable and tiresome. He's upset over a software update which can disable iPhones and prevent third-party applications from running. Actually, the "goodbye cruel world" post has some pretty good analysis on the whole situation, though it's a little — ok, a lot — heavy on the melodrama. His rant about Apple CEO Steve Jobs, after the jump.

Apple's industrial design lead Jonathan Ive is one of those ultimately profilable characters, an industry superstar with a compelling philosophy (a ready-made metanarrative for profile writers). BusinessWeek just published a profile useful as an intro to Ive. For those who already know him, the angle isn't anything suprising, but it does include some clever stories:

CNET thinks Apple will buy Nintendo. Oh yeah, that's totally true, don't you think? For so many reasons:

Could Apple buy Disney? Probably not, but Barron's (in what's surely not an attempt to drum up controversy and circulation) published a piece speculating so. But just because Apple CEO Steve Jobs owns 7% of Disney doesn't mean he wants the rest. There are the obvious reasons:

Jonathan Ive is Jobs' style guy. The industrial designer keeps it beautiful by keeping it simple. So does Jim Buckmaster, the Craigslist CEO who keeps the classifieds unadorned.