Apple remembers Steve Jobs on anniversary of his passing
Tim Cook just posted the above letter on Apple’s website to reminisce and pay homage to the company’s late cofounder, Steve Jobs.
Today is the one-year anniversary of Jobs’ passing, so Apple updated its homepage early this morning with a video montage to remember his life and death. The nearly two-minute video presents a slideshow of Jobs throughout his career and it softly ends with “Remembering Steve”.
Apple unveiled the iPhone 4S on Oct. 4, 2011, but one seat left open for Jobs at the packed event notably sat empty. The next day, Jobs died. After he passed, at just 56 years old, news of his death flooded the Internet, TV, newspapers, and homes. Millions of people immediately emailed Apple, and the company subsequently created a “Remembering Steve” page to display a massive compilation of condolences that poured in from around the world.
The tribute letter from Apple’s current CEO appears upon completion of the “Remembering Steve” video. In the message, Cook describes Jobs’ death as a “sad and difficult time”. The executive hopes, however, that everyone will “reflect on [Jobs'] extraordinary life and the many ways he made the world a better place.” A screenshot of Cook’s entire letter is above, while a text version is available after the break.
Apple has become the most valuable company in the world during the last year, and it is hard not to give respect to the man whose imagination and innovation helped push the company to record-breaking heights.
A slight variation of the above went to employees in a company email:
Team,
Steve's passing one year ago today was a sad and difficult time for all of us. I hope that today everyone will reflect on his extraordinary life and the many ways he made the world a better place. As you and I know firsthand, one of the greatest gifts Steve gave to the world is Apple. No company has ever inspired such creativity or set such high standards for itself. Our values originated from Steve and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple. We share the great privilege and responsibility of carrying his legacy into the future. I'm incredibly proud of the work we are doing, delivering products that our customers love and dreaming up new ones that will delight them down the road. Thank you for dedicating your talents and so much of your lives to Apple. It's a wonderful tribute to Steve's memory and everything he stood for.
Tim
The Best Steve Jobs Moments In History [Video Gallery]
Steve Jobs had a stage presence like no one else. He was just pedaling tech products, but the man captivated his audiences like he was Jimi Hendrix or Elvis or John Lenon. Steve didn’t just introduce a new computer or new iPod, he was selling a philosophy and way of life, and once he activated his reality distortion field on stage you were spellbound by his performance.
There are tons of amazing Steve Jobs videos on the internet, but we’ve gone out and collected the ones that we think are the best. Not just the videos where he introduces products, but also his candid interviews where Steve reveals his thoughts on life. We hope you enjoy them just as much as we do.
Stanford Commencement Speech in 2005
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at D8
Steve Jobs Unveiling The Macintosh
Steve Jobs Talking About The Crazy Ones
Steve At MacWorld 2007 Revealing Microsoft Partnership
5 Things Steve Jobs Would Have Been Proud Of At Apple In 2012 [Feature]
What would Apple’s late CEO be impressed with from this year?
Steve Jobs was passionate about a lot of things: simplicity, challenging the status quo, creating products that people loved, etc. He was a man of many shining strengths and deep personality flaws. As one of the most dynamic titans to ever grace the tech industry, one can only imagine what Jobs would think of Apple in 2012. How would he have handled Mapgate? We’ll never know.
Based on what we do know about the late CEO, there are several things Jobs would have definitely been proud of at Apple in 2012.
iPhone 5
The iPhone 5 is undoubtedly the best iPhone Apple has ever made, and it’s release has seen little to no hiccups (aside from people wining about the new dock connector). You can complain about how the iPhone 5 is “boring” until the cows come home, but that doesn’t mean it’s still not the best smartphone on the market right now. Apple nailed every expected feature and managed to noticeably change the look and feel of the iPhone, which was sorely needed this year.
Considering that Steve Jobs personally oversaw the development of the iPhone 5 before he died, it’s definitely not a stretch to say that he’d be proud of the product now. Apple sold an impressive 5 million+ units during the first weekend of availability, which shatters the record set by the 4S. Make no mistake, the iPhone 5 is a huge success, and Jobs would be proud.
MacBook Pro with Retina display
How could Steve Jobs not be proud of Apple releasing the sexiest laptop ever made? The 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display is a phenomenal machine with a groundbreaking display. Sure, it may cost a little more than most are willing to pay, but it’s a sign of things to come. Apple started the Retina revolution in its Mac lineup this year, and slowly but surely we’ll see the same display technology spread to all of Apple’s other desktop computers.
Steve Jobs loved the MacBook Air, and the MacBook Pro with Retina display is the perfect blend of Air and Pro. It’s got the slim and trim form factor Jobs loved so much with prosumer specs. Jobs loved the average joe consumer, but he also had a heart for the professionals who rely on Apple’s tech every day. This summer’s laptop caters to both camps.
Third-gen iPad
Apple introduced a fantastic update to the iPad earlier this year, and Steve Jobs would have undoubtedly wanted to be onstage showing it off to the world. The original iPad was Jobs’s brainchild before the iPhone. He publicly referenced his idea for a tablet decades ago, and it’s clear that he saw the iPad has the future of modern computing.
Tim Cook now carriers the banner of the “post-PC era,” a term coined by Jobs at the original iPad launch in 2010. The third-gen iPad Apple unveiled back in March has only helped to further the post-PC revolution, which seemed to be Jobs’s biggest passion before he died.
Rising stock
While Steve Jobs claimed to not care about money, Apple wouldn’t be where it is today if the folks in Cupertino didn’t know a thing or two about generating loads of cash. Apple’s profit margins are unlike anyone else’s, and the company’s stock value has passed juggernauts like Exxon and climbed to the top of the market. At the beginning of 2012, AAPL sat at $405 per share. It hit $700 last month and now sits around $670. That’s unprecedented growth. It’s a safe to assume that Jobs would be very proud to say he built the most valuable company on earth.
Winning the lawsuit against Samsung
Apple recently won what is considered the biggest software patent lawsuit in history against Samsung. While the courtroom’s rulings are far from over, Apple is seen by the public as the clear winner against Samsung’s cheap attempts to copy the iPhone. Samsung has to pay Apple $1 billion in damages for patent infringement, but Apple wants blood. A judge will soon be ruling on whether Apple can ban the sales of Samsung’s flagship Android handsets and tablets in the United States. If the court again sides with Apple, the outcome of the lawsuit will be a massive blow to the Cupertino company’s main competitor in the smartphone space.
Steve Jobs made it clear that he hated Google for making Android, and he famously declared to wage “thermonuclear” war on the search giant. While Samsung isn’t Google, winning this year’s lawsuit means a lot for Apple’s war on Android. And make no mistake, for Jobs, winning that war was crucial to Apple’s success as an innovator and trend-setter.
5 Incredible Apple Products Designed By Steve Jobs We Still Haven’t Seen [Feature]
The visionary co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, may have been dead for a year today, but the fruits of his incredible imagination, indefatigable quest for perfection and keen design eye are still ripening and shaking from the tree of the company that he created. The recently released iPhone 5 and new Lightning Connectors were approved by him before he died, the upcoming iPad mini was greenlit personally by Steve, and Apple’s upcoming roadmap for the next couple of years will probably be filled with projects that he personally oversaw.
Some of Steve Jobs’s last unrealized products loom larger than others, though. Here are the five incredible products from Steve Jobs that we still haven’t seen.
iPad mini
Some might argue that the iPad mini is Apple’s first truly post-Steve product. After all, Steve Jobs famously railed against 7-inch Android tablets, calling them “tweeners” that “sucked to use” without having sandpaper to file your digits down to points.
But then again, Steve Jobs was a blustery man, and said many things he didn’t really believe. For example, he once said that the iPod would never get video support, because no one wanted to watch video on a tiny display. He often said things he didn’t mean to throw off the competition.
It turns out that secretly, Steve Jobs was very interested in a smaller iPad. In recent testimony in the Samsung trial, Apple senior VP of iOS software Scott Forstall said he’d turned Steve Jobs around on the idea of 7-inch tablets.
“Having used a Samsung Galaxy [Tab],” Cue wrote, “I tend to agree with many of the comments [in the editorial] (except actually moving off the iPad). I believe there will be a 7″ market and we should do one.”
Cue says he “expressed this to Steve several times since Thanksgiving and he seemed very receptive.” When the iPad mini is announced later this month, it’ll be yet another product that Steve Jobs directly had his hand in.
iCar
Steve Jobs had a strange relationship with automobiles. He famously capitalized upon an obscure Californian law so that he never had to have license plates on his car and could exchange it every six months for an identical model of his favorite auto, a Mercedes SL55 AMG.
But Steve eventually wanted to get into the car business. According to J. Crew CEO and Apple board member Mickey Drexler, in fact, Jobs’s eventual dream was to create an Apple-branded iCar.
““Look at the car industry; it’s a tragedy in America. Who is designing the cars?” Drexler said. “Steve’s dream before he died was to design an iCar.” Drexler also said that, ”it would’ve been probably 50% of the market. He [Jobs] never did design it.”
Spaceship Campus
In the months before Steve Jobs died last year, he was incredibly vital, attending his last WWDC and then rushing home to take care of his company by pitching the city of Cupertino Apple’s new “spaceship” campus, a massive new headquarters that would fit over 12,000 employees in a circular building made entirely of curved glass, complete with a massive underground parking lot and secret auditorium where Apple would reveal all of its future products. All while actually increasing the number of trees in the area from 3,400 to 6,000. Wow.
When Steve Jobs — master of the reality distortion field — comes in to pitch something as breathtaking as this campus to the city council of Cupertino, a bunch of politicians don’t have a chance: they gave the stamp of approval to the measure in a heartbeat. Construction has yet to begin on the Spaceship Campus, but it’s coming. And when it’s here, it’ll be bigger than the flippin’ Pentagon.
iYacht
It seems weird that Steve Jobs — who never was much for ostentatious displays of wealth, and seemingly never showed a lick of interest in the sea — would want to build a super yacht near the end of his life, but he did, designed by none other than legendary French designer Philipe Starck.
Described by Steve Jobs’s biographer Walter Isaacson as “sleek and minimalistic” and using a special glass designed by the chief engineer of Apple’s retail stores, Starck has confirmed that the iYacht is a project that will still likely reach completion, and that he now meets regularly with Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, when he is in California.
“It’s not a project with Apple. It’s a private project that began with Steve Jobs and that has been taken over by his wife,” a spokeswoman for Starck told The Wall Street Journal. Starck revealed during his interview that he now meets with Steve’s wife, Laurene Powell, whenever he’s in California.
Steve Jobs apparently decided to start working on a yachy after taking a cruise from Italy to Turkey, which he described as his “best vacation.” He repeatedly changed the design of the yacht during its early stages, and like the products he helped design at Apple, Steve stressed perfecting the tiniest details.
Steve nearly cancelled the project in 2009 during his battle with pancreatic cancer. ”I didn’t think I would be alive when it got done,” he told Isaacson. “But that made me so sad, and I decided that working on the design was fun to do, and maybe I have a shot at being alive when it’s done.”
Sadly, he didn’t, but like many works of great design, the iYacht, when it is finally seen, will be an immortal tribute to him.
iTV
The Apple HDTV or ITV, Apple’s serious foray into the living room, is the stuff of legends at this point. It’s without a doubt Apple’s most famous unreleased product, largely stemming from Steve Jobs’ claims to Walter Isaacson months before he died that he’d finally “cracked” the television problem.
Whatever Apple’s solution to television is, though, no one knows. Apple has repeatedly been working to try to bring Steve Jobs’s vision to market for years, most recently reaching out to cable providers to stream live TV to the living room, but the cable industry doesn’t intend to let Apple get any foot in the door after what Apple did to the music industry and the telecom industry.
The Apple HDTV could very well be the product that will do for the living room what the iPhone did for smartphones, the iPad for tablets, or the MacBook Air for ultraportables, but for right now, it’s just a mirage product for consumers, constantly glimmering hazily on the horizon. It’s unknown if Apple will ever manage to release the iTV, but when it does, it will likely be Steve Jobs’s last and ultimate project.
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