Apple makes Jobs memorial public

Apple has made its memorial to its deceased leader, Steve Jobs, available to the public. The 81 minute service featured performances by Coldplay and Norah Jones as well as speeches by Al Gore and Jobs’ successor at Apple, Tim Cook.

On the day of the service, Apple closed of all its stores, allowing employees to tune in to the service.

Apple’s senior vice president for industrial design Jonathan “Jony” Ive, who Jobs called his “spiritual partner” at Apple, recalled Jobs firing off ideas that ranged from “dopey” to “magnificent”.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said that “The last two weeks have been the saddest of my life, by far. But Steve would have wanted the cloud to lift from Apple.”

He added that Jobs was thinking about the company right until the end of his life.

According to Cook, one of the last pieces of advice offered by Jobs was to “never ask what he would do, just do what’s right.”

“He had the curiosity of a child and the mind of a genius,” said Cook, before recalling one of Jobs’ favourite phrases: “‘Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to make your thinking clean enough, make it simple. But once you get there, you can move mountains.’ Steve never followed the herd. He always did what he thought was right, not what was easy. He never accepted the merely good.”

Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Former US Vice President, and Apple board member Al Gore spoke about how Jobs had engendered a love of technology in millions of people around the world

“People can experience love in the use of technology that erases the barriers between them and what they want to connect to … When he left us, he took with him the love of millions of people. There are millions of pieces of Steve’s heart out there all over the world.”

Coldplay frontman Chris Martin recalled meeting Jobs backstage at a concert. According to the singer, they spoke for some time before Jobs fixed his Macbook.

At the end of his address, a tearful Bill Campbell, chairman of Apple’s board of directors, recalled Jobs reaction when he first tested Siri, Apple’s voice assistant app on the then-unreleased iPhone 4S:

“He asked, ‘Siri, are you a man or a woman?’ Siri said, ‘they have not assigned me a gender, sir.'”

The tribute to Jobs went live as his authorised biography, written by Walter Isaacson hit bookstores.

Jobs’ wife Laurene Powell, a former Goldman Sachs trader, was also present at the memorial.