A great company that's starting to emit a whiff of deterioration (e.g: Willie Mays as a Met): Apple (AAPL). It’s still claiming the health of Steve Jobs was “non-material and personal” -- despite Jobs’s recent liver transplant at a Memphis hospital.

The Apple's erstwhile party line had been that Jobs had a hormonal imbalance. At best, that’s wildly misleading (akin to saying you have a heart problem that will cause the organ to eventually stop beating). At worst, it’s clear deception of shareholders, and an unparalleled example of arrogance and condescension. If a person wants his or her health to be a private matter, that person shouldn’t run a public company.

Call me a cynic (I call myself one, though I’m generally not), but I think the Board of Directors announced the news about Jobs last Saturday (Saturday?) because they knew they’d be able to announce 1,000,000-plus iPhone sales on Monday morning. What didn’t seem to occur to them is the fact that the timing of the releases wouldn’t slip past the media or the public.

The company may be a run for the ages; the new phone may be great. But years of denying Jobs’s health issues (it took years to reveal the fact that he had pancreatic cancer) has revealed its priorities. Clearly, it’s on Steve Jobs’s side. The Apple directors built the cult, and they continue to defend it and pay for it. This is looking out for long-term investors in case Mr. Jobs does, in fact, live forever.

What’s more, as long as Apple keeps the iPhone exclusively on the AT&T (T) network, the phone will be a spectacular toy, great for everything -- except making phone calls. Cellular phones are phones, first and foremost. When the devices can’t satisfy that minimal standard, they become juke boxes, games, and commuting time-killers.

As it happens, I actually violated the “lob softball” rules of financial TV by improvising somewhat stern questions to popular AT&T CFO Richard Lindner the first day of iPhone’s iteration. Specifically, I stared him in the eye an asked if AT&T would make money having presumably “won” the bid to carry the iPhone. Furthermore, I asked if AT&T’s terribly regarded and aged network would mean they’d be blamed for every shortcoming in the iPhone.

Mr. Lindner wouldn’t -- or couldn’t -- answer the first question. (My money’s on “wouldn’t.”) He’s the CFO, after all). For the second inquiry, he tried to turn the tables on me, asking if I was unaware of the “billions” AT&T was going to be putting into their network.