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Steve Jobs, adulated gadget hero, was feeling underappreciated not too long ago.

Steve Jobs, the man rolling out iPods, iPhones and cool computers to millions of adoring customers, once felt he wasn't getting enough respect--from his own board of directors. That, at least, was what he told the Securities & Exchange Commission while explaining his actions in the Apple option-backdating scandal that broke in 2006. The scandal, which was part of what caused Apple then to take an $84 million earnings writedown, raised questions about whether Jobs had helped set advantageous grant dates for options for himself and other executives.

The famously private, secretive Jobs, 54, who was treated in 2004 for pancreatic cancer, has been out since January on a medical leave originally attributed to a hormone imbalance. Questions about his health and ability to return full-time--in June, Apple ( AAPL - news - people ) says--occasion much Silicon Valley gossip, especially among investors who consider him the main reason for the company's 1,000% stock rise since 2001.

SEC lawyers grilled Jobs last year as part of a backdating lawsuit against Nancy R. Heinen, Apple's ex-general counsel and Jobs' longtime colleague. Without admitting anything, she paid $2.2 million to settle charges that she had backdated option grants for Jobs, herself and others, and ginned up bogus paperwork to hide the backdating, including minutes of a nonexistent Apple board meeting.

After a Freedom of Information Act battle, this magazine got a copy of Jobs' sworn examination. (Although Jobs and Apple were part of a separate shareholders derivative suit settled for $14 million, both avoided litigation.) The 119-page deposition, taken on Mar. 18, 2008 at Apple's Cupertino, Calif. headquarters, offers a rare look at Jobs in his own words.

At some point in 2001 Jobs went to his board and asked for a big option grant. In the deposition Jobs said he had simply wanted a pat on the back. "It wasn't so much about the money," The Forbes 400 member told an SEC lawyer. "Everybody likes to be recognized by his peers. ... I felt that the board wasn't really doing the same with me." With all of his prior stock options underwater from the dot-com bust, "I just felt like there is nobody looking out for me here, you know. ... So I wanted them to do something, and so we talked about it. ... I thought I was doing a pretty good job."

Wouldn't it have been nice, he was thinking, if the board had come to him and said, "'Steve, we got this new grant for you,' without me having to suggest anything or be involved in anything or negotiate anything. ... It would have made me feel better at the time."

Jobs testified that the board had approved an option on 7.5 million shares at an August 2001 meeting, when the share price was $17.83, but that he had continued to argue with directors about whether the options should vest immediately or over a staggered schedule. The debate helped cause Apple to miss deadlines for filing notifications with the SEC and its own auditors.

On Dec. 18, 2001, according to the SEC, Jobs and the Apple board finalized the terms of the grant to Jobs. Apple's price (not adjusted for subsequent splits) was now $21.01, but, the SEC said, the grant was backdated to Oct. 19, when the share price was $18.30. The earlier date put him $20 million ahead. Jobs later swapped the options for restricted stock of lesser value.

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BURLINGAME, Calif.--Note to the auto industry: You want Steve Jobs? You can't handle Steve Jobs.

It's a cliché by now to suggest that all the U.S. auto industry needs is someone like the Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) chief executive. On paper, the idea makes sense. At Apple, Jobs turned a struggling has-been into a world-beating innovation factory. Wow, just think what he could do for General Motors (nyse: GM - news - people ).

The problem: The idea is completely idiotic. That's because if Jobs actually were installed at GM it would be the most chaotic day in American history since Gettysburg, except more people would die.

The suggestion comes amid doubts about Jobs' ability to continue running Apple, let alone a car company. Jobs will likely miss Apple's annual shareholder meeting Wednesday for the first time since rejoining the company in 1997, due to health problems. Last month, Jobs announced he will be taking a medical leave of absence until June. Moreover, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is said to be investigating what Apple has told investors about Jobs' health, even as his appearance became increasingly gaunt at public events throughout last year.

In short, if anyone thinks Jobs should run a car company, we can start with the fact that he is very much unavailable right now. Jobs is working on getting healthy again, one hopes, rather than thinking about his next career move. Blogger Robert X. Cringely reported Saturday that Jobs has not been online for weeks now, worrying his closest cronies.

But even if Jobs were to take the GM gig, how would he make a domestic car company more like Apple? Well, he could start by sending all the factory jobs to contract manufacturers in Asia. That would go over well with the United Auto Workers. But that's part of what makes Apple such a profit machine. It doesn't have to worry about the fixed costs involved with owning and operating a factory the way GM does.

What else would Jobs do? At Apple, he used secrecy to turn every new product launch into a media event. Jobs had few resources, and he knew he had to make the most of them. The result: Only a handful of Apple employees would know what Apple was about to introduce until Jobs unveiled it, usually only days before it went on sale. The move allowed Apple to get the most from radical, attention-getting designs like the 2002-era iMac G4. That, of course, would go over great with the federal regulators who oversee highway safety.

In short, the reason the auto industry doesn't need Jobs is that he wouldn't be able to make the Apple playbook work at a car company. To be sure, the suggestion does work as a sort of Swiftian vote of no confidence in the domestic auto industry. If read as a critique of the way the U.S. auto industry works now, rather than a serious suggestion, the idea has some merit.

BURLINGAME, Calif.--Mark your calendars. Thanks to Steve Jobs, January has become the season of surprises for the technology industry.

Over the past decade, Jobs has taken over the global music business, turned Apple's (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) clunky computer business into a juggernaut and stormed through the wireless industry with the iPhone. As a result, the Cupterino, Calif., company's shares have risen more than 1,000% over the past 10 years. By contrast, mighty Microsoft's (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) shares have fallen more than 40%.

So what's next? Nobody knows. That's what makes Apple so dangerous. The only certainty: Apple will surprise us with something during the first full week of January at MacWorld in San Francisco. The week is usually marked by big news from Apple Chief Jobs.

In Pictures: 10 Great Steve Jobs Moments

So what will it be this year? Rumors abound. Some speculate that Apple will introduce a tablet computer. Others say Apple will roll out a line of low-cost iPhones. Anything is possible. That's in large part because Apple has been so unpredictable over the past decade.

The biggest surprises have been unexpected new products. The pattern was set in 1998, when Jobs unveiled the candy-colored all-in-one iMac. Since then, Jobs has launched a barrage of surprises. The biggest include the MacBook Air and the Cube.

Even the widely anticipated iPhone was a surprise. While reporters had teased out the new products name, few guessed that Apple would introduce a touch-screen phone that didn't sport any buttons.

Probably the biggest shock was Apple's switch to Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) processors. While the switch had been rumored for months before the 2005 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, many had dismissed the rumor as absurd. Instead, it turned out to be true.

Ten years from now Steve Jobs' iPhone will be just another obsolete gadget. Rob Bailey's vitamin vodka, however, will still refresh.

It never would have happened if Bailey hadn't left his business-development job at Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) in 2006 to pursue alcoholic immortality.

Two years later, Bailey has won awards from the San Francisco Wine and Spirits Festival and the Beverage Tasting Institute and signed deals that will put his Lotus vodka in outlets such as Safeway (nyse: SWY - news - people ) and Beverages and More. "Who would have thought," Bailey says. "I've scaled up from two people to eight and Citigroup has just laid off 55,000."

Or that Yahoo!, once king of the Web, would be cutting its workforce too. Insiders say the struggling Sunnyvale, Calif., Internet portal will layoff 1,500 employees Wednesday in an effort to become a leaner, more aggressive company that can compete with Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ). Word is Yahoo!'s sales force will be chopped by roughly 30%. Even Yahoo!'s vaunted engineers will face cuts, with more than 5% losing their jobs.

All newly unemployed Yahoo's, however, will find plenty of support. "I'd like to tell them that this layoff probably has more to do with management mistakes," says Hongche Liu, chief information architect at people-search engine Spock and a Yahoo! veteran.

But while troubled Wall Street firms, car companies, and media companies may crank out products nobody wants, demand for the online services Yahoo! employees create remains high. Liu even urges Yahoo! workers to master the monetization skills that so often seemed to elude the company. "A downturn is the best time to latch onto the next big wave," Liu says.

Recruiters are already scouring Yahoo!'s ranks for engineers who are skilled at moving video around the Web, building big, stable Web services and making sites friendlier to search engines. Sales people who can drum up new business online while exploiting the contacts they developed at Yahoo! will also be highly sought after, recruiters say.

Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs has been dancing on the tables at Nokia's party for just a little too long, and it looks like the Finns have finally pulled out the collapsible baton. If you're a fan of consumer electronics, then this is a bone-busting brawl that you're going to enjoy.

The Nokia (nyse: NOK - news - people ) N97, introduced at the Nokia World 2008 conference in Barcelona Tuesday, is a GPS-equipped, 3G phone that comes with a touchscreen, a keyboard and a mission: stopping Apple's (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) iPhone.

But the real damage from the N97 could be to the emerging market for small, thin, cheap and connected laptop computers known as netbooks. After all, the Nokia N97 and even Apple's iPod Touch promise to do everything a netbook does with one key difference: You can actually slip these suckers into your pocket.

Netbooks are hot right now, to be sure. Netbooks hawked by Asus, ACER and Samsung dominated sales on Amazon.com's (nasdaq: AMZN - news - people ) computer and PC hardware category Monday.

The dinky laptops, many sporting Intel's (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) power-sipping Atom processor have seven- and 10-inch screens, scaled-down keyboards, built-in wi-fi connections and price tags starting at less than $400. Nokia's N97, by contrast, will likely start at just under $700 when it goes on sale in Europe next year.

All those new netbook buyers will soon discover, however, that it's tough to scale down expectations to match a new price point. Not that Intel, the netbook's biggest backer, isn't trying. "If you've ever used a netbook, it's fine for an hour," Stu Pann, vice president of sales and marketing at Intel, told investors at a Raymond James IT supply chain conference. "It's not something you're going to use day in and day out."

If you own a smart phone, however, you will use it every day. Not that the N97 meant to compete, directly, with the Asus Eee PC, Dell's Inspiron Mini 9 or HP's Mini 1000. That, however, is what makes it so dangerous: The N97 isn't a laptop scaled down to be more portable and more connected. Smart phones started out that way, and, thanks to Intel, they're only going to be getting smarter.