It's amazing he fought this cancer as long as he did.
It's really sad but, everyone dies which is unfortunate.
Fuck you cancer.
I've only become interested in his illness since his death and from what I've read about the diagnosis/treatment time line he seems to have died a rich man's death.
When you become ill, the most dangerous thing you can do is consider you are worthy of extra special treatment.
Steve Jobs died from a malignant insulinoma (tumour of the insulin secreting cells of the pancreas). Most insulin secreting tumours are benign and those few that are malignant do not spread rapidly. The diagnosis was apparently made on CT scan in 2003. At this point the accepted treatment is surgery (which has a 90% success rate), Mr Jobs elected to try alternative "therapies" instead. He didn't come to surgery for almost 10 months (giving the malignant cancer plenty of time to spread to his liver).
Four years later (2009), he underwent a liver transplant to remove his tumour ridden liver. This is ridiculous treatment. The man had a malignant cancer (that is, there will have been many tiny pockets of the tumour spread throughout his body) and now (to prevent rejection of the transplanted liver) he will need to placed on powerful immunosuppressive therapy. The problem here is that immunosuppressive treatment accelerates the growth of cancer. Only a lunatic quack would seriously submit a patient in Jobs' condition to this. A lunatic, or perhaps someone swayed by the patients' fame and wealth.
The tragedy of Steve Jobs' death is not that it was preventable, but that it was certainly hastened by very poor and ill advised decisions and treatment.
His death is not dissimilar to that of Michael Jackson, who hired a personal physician and then brow beat him into administering an unmonitored anaesthetic to him to help him sleep.
It also reminds me of the case a Ariel Sharon (the former Israeli Prime Minister) who suffered a stoke at his home in 2006. Instead of waiting to get him to hospital and perform a CT scan of his brain (to determine if the stoke was due to a haemorrhage or a blocked artery), which is what any normal person would have done to them, the doctor in attendance gave Sharon a thrombolytic drug (excellent treatment if the stroke is due to a blocked artery or the absolutely worst thing you can possibly do if the stroke is due to a haemorrhage). Needless to say, Sharon's stroke was due to a haemorrhage and he is still dependent on life support 5 years later.
The rich and famous are still just flesh and blood, and the treatment of their illnesses should be guided by the latter and not the former.