Regarding #2 — when I first saw that rumor my thought was: where would he go? My take is that Ive is in some kind of lock-in — nowhere else would he get the culture, resources, help, anything he needs to be what he is.

The Ive thing is / was apparently about wanting to move back the UK and have his children educated here rather than work.

I'm guessing that he's set for life financially and that he'd basically have his pick of jobs or freelance work so while it might not be Apple, he's going to do fine.

But a recent newspaper article (it was the Daily Mail so I use the term newspaper loosely) said he wasn't looking to move back here and there was no truth to the rumour. No idea what their source but probably about as reliable / unreliable as the source of the original rumour which was pretty speculative to say the least.

Yeah. My [utterly speculative, outsider] feeling is that Ive wants to leave Apple to pursue other things about as much as Jobs does. The only thing I'd imagine could outweigh that would be family considerations.

With $18M/year salary I think he could go anywhere he wants and use his own resources, and create his own culture.

He'd probably do well in the auto industry.