Apple late Sunday posted on its web site video of its memorial for Steve Jobs.
Jobs’ successor Tim Cook kicked off the memorial. Former Vice President and Apple board member Al Gore, and Apple’s Senior Vice President of Design Jonathan Ive also spoke, and Norah Jones and Coldplay performed as Jobs’ wife Laurene Powell Jobs sat in the audience with a pair of sunglasses on.
Apple had closed all of its retail stores around the world for the memorial, and the video showed the campus filled with people surrounded by banners of black-and-white photos of Jobs.
Jobs died October 5 at the age of 56 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer, and after resigning in August as Apple’s CEO. He died a day after Apple introduced its iPhone 4S.
In a moving speech about the Apple co-founder’s legacy, Cook told the assembled crowd that “These last two weeks for me have been the saddest in my life by far.”
“He thought about Apple until the last day, and among his last advice he had for me, and for all of you was to never ask what he would do,” Cook said. “‘Just do what you think what’s right,’ he said.”
Jobs told Cook that he saw how The Walt Disney company was “paralyzed,” after Walt Disney died, and he didn’t want this to happen to Apple.
Jobs revolutionized the world of computing and desktop publishing in 1984 with the introduction of the Mac, and the accompanying Super Bowl ad “set a benchmark” for the advertising industry, Cook said.
The introduction of the iPod and iTunes “reminded us of our love for music,” and both changed the way the world listens to music as well as the music industry itself, he said. Apple then went on to reshape the mobile phone industry with the iPhone, and create a whole new product category with the iPad, and Pixar showed that “cartoons weren’t just for kids.”
For his part, Gore focused Apple employees’ attention on why he thinks Jobs’ passing moved so many people around the world so deeply.
He cited Reuters’ West Coast Bureau Chief Jonathan Weber’s recent essay on Jobs, which traced the root of that emotion to Jobs’ unique ability to make people love Apple’s products, and by extension the company.
“If you love Steve, as I did, and if you are part of Apple, as I am, then you understand deep in your heart already what you must become, as Steve also put it,” Gore said. “You know that the best way to fully express and animate that love is to direct its flow full force into the creativity and passion that lives inside the insanely great products that you design, engineer, manufacture and market , the ones that are connecting with the hearts and minds of millions of people today, and the new ones soon to come that millions of people will fall in love with all over again.”
