ONE morning, about a year ago, a doctor told Steve Jobs that a cancerous tumour in his pancreas would kill him within months, and that it was time to start saying his goodbyes. Later that night, an endoscopy revealed that the tumour could be cut out. But for one day Mr Jobs, the boss of Apple Computer, as well as Pixar, the world's most successful animation studio, stared death in the face.

The experience seems to have invigorated him. Last week, gaunter but otherwise undiminished, he was on a stage in San Francisco, putting on a show (for that is what Apple product launches are) that was as flashy and dynamic as any as he has ever thrown. When businessmen try to rub shoulders with pop stars, the effect is usually embarrassing. But “Steve” had arranged to have his pal, Madonna, pop up on screen and kidded around with her with panache. Does she have an iPod? Of course she has! “That's so duh,” said the superstar playfully. Then Mr Jobs segued into his announcements—a new mobile phone from Motorola that has iTunes, Apple's music software, pre-installed and that represents a beachhead into the world of phones; and the “iPod nano”, a new digital music-player that is thinner than a pencil, but still holds 1,000 songs.

For Mr Jobs, the product launch seemed mainly to be an opportunity to drive home the message that his hold on downloaded and portable music now seems overwhelming. iTunes sells 2m songs a day and has a world market share of 82%—Mr Jobs reckons that it is the world's second-largest internet store, behind only Amazon. And the iPod has a market share of 74%, with 22m sold. For a man who helped launch the personal-computer era in 1976 with the Apple I, but then had to watch Microsoft's Bill Gates walk away with, in effect, the monopoly on PC operating systems (Apple's market share in computers today is less than 3%), this must be some vindication.

The odd thing about near-death experiences—literal or metaphorical—in Mr Jobs's life is that he seems actually to need them sporadically in order to thrive. Mr Jobs himself suggested as much when he addressed the graduating class at Stanford University in June. Until he turned 30 in 1985, Mr Jobs led a life that fits almost every Silicon Valley cliché. He dropped out of college (like Bill Gates and Michael Dell); he started a company with a friend in a garage (like everybody from Hewlett and Packard to the founders of Google); he launched a revolution (the PC era). Big deal. The interesting event occurred when he was 30 and got fired from his own company, after Apple's board turned against him. He was “devastated”. His career seemed dead.

Characteristically, though, Mr Jobs bounced back, once he realised, as he said at Stanford, that “the heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again.” He did something uninterrupted success might have made impossible: he became more creative. In 1986 he started two new companies, NeXT, a computer-maker that was always too far ahead of its time, and Pixar, an animation studio that went on to have a series of box-office hits. A decade later, ironically enough, NeXT was bought by Apple, and Mr Jobs was brought back to run the company he had founded.

Mr Jobs, a pescatarian (ie, a vegetarian who eats fish) with a philosophical streak and a strong interest in the occult, interprets these reversals as lessons. As befits a man who grew up in California in the 1960s, he proclaims his belief in karma and in love. Not necessarily love of his employees, apparently—some of whom have found working for him a nightmare—but love of one's ideals. Always do only what you love, and never settle, he advised the students at Stanford. His brush with cancer, in particular, seems to have focused his mind. “Death is very likely the single best invention in life,” Mr Jobs told his young audience. “All external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”

Do not get the impression that Mr Jobs is now hugging strangers in random acts of kindness. He is still testy, irascible and difficult; he is still prepared to sue teenagers who publish Apple gossip on their websites for alleged abuses of trade secrets. But the reminders of mortality have changed him. “He was already softened” after his public humbling in 1985, says Bruce Chizen, the boss of Adobe Systems, a software company that is a long-time partner of Apple's. After the cancer, he says, “he's even softer” and, Mr Chizen reckons, even more creative.

New toys on the way

Mr Jobs's rivals may feel the same way. The digerati in Silicon Valley, Redmond (Microsoft), Tokyo (Sony), Seoul (Samsung) and other places now simply take it for granted that Mr Jobs has a top-secret conveyor belt that will keep churning out best-selling wonders like the iPod. What could these toys be? A portable video player is rumoured. A new and cooler sort of television is possible. A user-friendly and elegant mobile-phone handset would be nice, perhaps called something like “iPhone”.

Hollywood and music studios are also increasingly frightened. The music studios, which barely took him seriously when he launched iTunes in 2001, are sick of his power and are pressuring him to change his 99-cents-per-song flat rate for music. Slim chance. Disney, a long-time partner of Pixar whom Mr Jobs broke with when he got tired of its former boss, is now trying to worm its way back into his favour.

In short, Mr Jobs currently seems vivacious by anybody's standards. There are even rumours that he might run for governor of California (as a Democrat, presumably; Al Gore is on Apple's board). For somebody famous in large part for a spectacular defeat—to Bill Gates and Microsoft—all this must feel like a new lease of life, in every respect.