I'd seen that empty seat in the stream and that thought hadn't crossed my mind...

I got to talk to him once, during the 3G development. The phone team were all in the ID area for our weekly meeting with Jony. Steve appears and wants to know how everything is going; I was going over the board fit (ie, would all the components fit in the space allocated for the PCB) so I got to tell SJ that yes, it looked like everything would fit.

Kinda glad at that moment that things were going well. If he'd turned up during some of the earlier iPhone 4 meetings it might not have been such an easy answer

Definitely a big loss, but Apple is full of amazing people. It did help having one that (a) was always right and (b) that nobody would disagree with though!