Sounds Like Steve Picked a Good Meeting to Skip

Aside from a spontaneous “Happy Birthday” sung to an absent CEO Steve Jobs, Apple’s annual meeting today was something of a nonevent. Shareholders re-elected the company’s board of directors despite concerns about its handling of the disclosure of Jobs’s health problems. And the board continued to wave off questions about the company’s succession plans and Jobs’s well-being. Asked whether Jobs will return to work on schedule, Genentech (DNA) CEO and Apple (AAPL) board member Arthur Levinson said simply, “Nothing has changed.” Presumably, then, Jobs is expected to return to the company’s helm in June as planned.

Beyond that, there is little else to report. To wit, this first-hand account of the event posted to the Apple Insider forums:

There’s really nothing ‘material’ to report–even the usual gadflies (especially Mr. Ehrlich, the dude who disses Al Gore, the unions, and ‘socialist’ shareholders) trotted out the same old stuff.

The big event seemed to be the motley crew’s rendition of Happy Birthday to the absent CEO S. Jobs. The tenor was slightly different in that non-executive members-of-the-board (Levinson & Campbell) fielded questions at the behest of Tim Cook.

To me, the fact that few, if any, analyst-style financial questions were proffered shows that shareholders have little to wonder about the business of the juggernaut. This year, there was no barrage of product strategy questions by the likes of Prince McLean, which never really get addressed, per regulation FD and Apple policy, except enigmatically by Steve.”