Sadly, we heard about Steve Jobs's probable appearance on CNBC last night too late to tune in and watch; if we had known, we may well have been willing to commit horrible crimes against society in order to be in front of a cable-fed TV when Steve hit the airwaves. You may well wonder why the AtAT staff would stage a home invasion armed with nothing more than a menacingly-brandished stop sign wrenched from the asphalt just to see the Stevester talk to a suit about Apple's quarterly performance, but those of you who recall the man's January 1998 appearance on that station know exactly what we'd be hoping for: sometimes drama strikes twice.

Yes, it was over three years ago that Steve agreed to be interviewed by CNBC's Bruce Francis-- on the condition that Francis never raise the thorny (and, to Steve, utterly tiresome) subject of whether or not he'd ever become Apple's permanent CEO. Francis chose to ignore that little agreement, and badgered Steve about Apple's CEO search on-air until finally he asked whether the interim CEO sitting before him would ever drop the "interim" from his title-- to which Steve reportedly replied, "we weren't going to talk about this" and then simply got up and walked out, right on live TV. And we missed it! So now you can understand why word of an imminent Steve interview on CNBC would have sent us scurrying for the nearest TV while frothing at the mouth.

As it turns out, we didn't miss much. The Mac Observer has kindly posted a full transcript of Steve's brief appearance last night (complete with the "uh"s), and there isn't much drama there worth noting. In fact, Steve spends most of his time talking about his crystal ball and how gosh-darned "foggy" it is: "My crystal ball is pretty foggy in that regard... we have some visibility as to demand, but I don't think it goes out that far... anyone who says differently may have a better crystal ball than ours... certainly our crystal ball is pretty foggy right now about the global economy." Well, it's not the get-up-and-leave-in-a-snit high drama we were hoping for, but at least we can get some early Christmas shopping done; we're getting Steve a case of Madame Zola's Fog-B-Gone™ Crystal Ball Polish. Hey, anything to help the cause.