Investors and media pundits say Apple should have told shareholders about Steve Jobs’ liver transplant. Among many others voicing similar sentiments, Warren Buffett:

Some people might think I’m important to the company. Certainly Steve Jobs is important to Apple. So it’s a material fact. Whether he is facing serious surgery or not is a material fact. Whether I’m facing serious surgery is a material fact.

Puhleeze. Apple’s stock went up 70-percent during Jobs’ medical leave. What’s to complain about?

Ryan Tate in Gawker:

Apple products are made in factories that regularly employ young teenagers, constantly work people more than 60 hours per week, and falsify records to cover up their misdeeds.

The only problem with Tate’s statement? Facts. What’s his source?

That’s according to the shameless gossiping muckrakers at… uh, Apple Inc.

Apple released a Supplier Responsibility 2010 Progress Report (PDF) which disclosed three instances which violated Apple’s policies.

Apple discovered three facilities that had previously hired 15-year-old workers in countries where the minimum age for employment is 16. Across the three facilities, our auditors found records of 11 workers who had been hired prior to reaching the legal age, although the workers were no longer underage or no longer in active employment at the time of our audit.

From that, Tate castigates Apple by writing that the company regularly hires underage workers, and constantly work them beyond 60 hours a week.

Tate’s accusations put Gawker Valleywag clearly in the category of Fox News. What’s fair and balanced is really inaccurate and distorted for the sole purpose of sensationalizing issues.

Just when you thought the whole world was converging to do everything on the browser, Rohit Sharma finds that the browser is dead. How so? The iPhone’s many apps and utilities made the browser nearly obsolete.

The browser is dead. And it’s because all those apps that now monopolize my time have taken their pick of browser parts from the bin and blossomed into a phenomenon all their own.

Sharma sees a trend in the thousands of applications and utilities offered in Apple’s App Store expanding to the desktop with Google Chrome and Safari.

Going forward, this trend of apps jumping out of the browser and onto available screen real estate will only gain steam. After all, with active push notifications, clicking a stock price or weather forecast or gas price app on the live desktop is definitively a better user experience than that of a browser.

Maybe so. I use Safari less on my iPhone than on my Mac.

Ernie Varitimos of AppleInvestor says the iPad will be delayed. Apple still says the iPad will ship as scheduled near the end of March. Ernie’s logic:

Apple did not say that there wouldn’t be a smaller supply, they only said that the late March introduction is on schedule. They did not rebuke the claim that they would have only far fewer units than first planned, nor did they comment on a limited introduction to the US. If that is in fact the case, then the iPad will be delayed for many, many people.

Apple had originally planned to deliver 1 million at launch but will only be able to deliver 300K. I would call that a delay for 700K people!

So, Apple is sharing product delivery information with Ernie Varitimos? I don’t think so.

Free Software Foundation’s ‘5 reasons to avoid iPhone 3G.’ A lengthy, uninformed, unbalanced, and self-righteous treatise on why a profit motivation is bad for consumers, and why open source software is better for the world than anything the obviously corrupt and evil Steve Jobs and Apple and Company will do for you.

Apple, through its marketing and visual design techniques, is manufacturing an illusion that merely buying an Apple makes you part of an alternative community. But the technology they use is explicitly chosen to divide people into separate digital cells, and to position Apple as sole warden. When your business depends on people paying for the privilege of being locked up, the prison better look and feel luxurious, and the bars better not be too visible.

John Gruber’s take: “They’re accusing Apple of concocting the whole thing as some sort of profit-making scheme.”

Shame on Apple. Not.

When open source comes up with software as cool as Apple’s, for free, I’ll pay more attention. For now, it’s not much of a contest.