Bloomberg News moved an alert on its wires at 12:36 PM Eastern Time saying that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is back at work. The Associated Press followed up with an alert of its own at 12:48 PM. This now makes it official. I don’t know exactly why anyone should be surprised, given how its both the end of June, and Apple has consistently, maddeningly, repeated over and over in response to practically any question about the CEO, that “Steve looks forward to returning to work in June.” That statement, usually attributed to Apple spokesman Steve Dowling has been replaced by a new one: “We are very glad to have him back.” Additionally, there was the little bit about Steve being quoted in the press release concerning sales of the iPhone 3GS. Apple stock is up 32 cents or 0.22% as of 1:20 PM EDT. The next step in the process is for Jobs to be seen at some kind of Apple event. I’d start looking for that in September. With the iPhone and MacBook

upgrades now out of the way, there isn’t a lot of major product news to expect from Apple for the remainder of the summer, though I should hedge that by saying that Apple hasn’t — at least in recent months — been sticking to its well-worn product-introduction patterns. For the last few years Apple has refreshed its iPod line every September since 2005, and it would seem that the iPod touch would be the next likely candidate for some attention. Now that the iPhone 3GS is sporting 32 gigabytes of storage capacity, it would make some sense for the iPod touch to go to 64 GB, and to perhaps get a camera and maybe even an internal microphone — for audio recording apps and for VOIP-over-WiFi apps like Skype, and to ship with iPhone OS 3.0 pre-installed. It would make sense for Steve to introduce just such a product in person at an Apple media extravaganza, would it not?

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It’s Official: Steve Jobs is Back at work at Apple