No one could possibly have missed the point. There was Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook pointedly wearing a black shirt and casually walking up and down the stage as he held up the company’s new iPhone 4S – the one that talks.
He was doing a passable – but only passable – imitation of Apple’s guiding genius Steve Jobs, who always wore a black shirt, though one with a turtle-neck.
The scene positively shrieked that life would carry on, a demonstration not just of the updated iPhone but, crucially, that nothing would be changing at Apple even without its ailing messiah.
Steve Jobs: The Apple founder has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 56 Memorial: Chinese students in California lay candles in the shape of the Apple logo and Steve Jobs' name in English and ChineseJust hours later Jobs, an adopted child and university dropout who was Apple’s founder and innovator, was dead, aged 56, from the cancer he once thought he’d beaten.
Think of Britain without Churchill; Manchester United without Sir Alex Ferguson; now Apple without Jobs. And this at a time when competitors are snapping at the firm’s heels, especially as their products are anything but cheap.
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You may think that never has Steve Jobs’ towering and frequently despotic influence been needed more than now. Jobs himself certainly thought so. Anticipating his own death, he took extraordinary steps in the years after pancreatic cancer was diagnosed in 2004 to ensure the company would continue to be run as he ran it.
New arrival: Jobs' replacement Tim Cook unveiled the iPhone 4S earlier this week, in his first launch since become chief executive of AppleCompetition: The Samsung Galaxy Tab, left, and the Kindle Fire threaten the dominance of the iPad
Three years ago, after his cancer had returned and spread to his liver, he set up what he called the Apple University and hired Joel Podolny, dean of the Yale School of Management, to run it.
Its students were exclusively Apple employees. The syllabus: Intensive case studies of significant decisions in Apple’s recent history, so a new generation could absorb and reproduce the culture and executive thinking that he created. In effect, he was institutionalising his way of doing things.
A lesson had certainly been learned from the period back in the Eighties when the company really did think it could do without him.
This was soon after Jobs had asked John Scully, then the CEO of Pepsi, to join his expanding Apple organisation. In typically blunt language, Jobs said: ‘Do you want to make sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world?’
Scully joined the company in 1984, but the following year when the company was going through a bad patch, he organised a boardroom coup in which Jobs was ousted. He was 30.
Apple: Well-wishers have left dozens of fruits at the Apple store in Covent Garden Mourner: This fan in New York has made a memorial to Mr Jobs with his iPad, one of the last creations of the visionary genius‘I was fired – how can you get fired from a company you started?’ Jobs jestingly lamented years later, when he was back running the company. In fact, only when Jobs returned in 1997 – when Apple took over another company that he founded – did Apple take off on its exhilarating rise to global celebration.
That bad patch, incidentally, involved the launching in 1984 of the first Macintosh computer to use an as-yet unknown piece of equipment.
To illustrate just how far ahead was Jobs’s thinking, no words could improve on those of celebrated technology commentator John C Dvorak, who wrote in the San Francisco Examiner: ‘The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a “mouse”. There is no evidence that people want to use these things.’
But Steve Jobs enjoyed the recollection of the rejections he received. His was the satisfaction of a man worth upwards of £5billion, a man who once slept on friends’ floors and collected Coke bottles to claim the five cents refund on each return so he could eat.
It is certainly ironic that rejection was the hallmark of his brilliant life from the moment he was born in San Francisco. His biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student and she decided to put him up for adoption. His biological father was a Syrian Muslim immigrant who later became a political science professor.
Everything was set for him to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife (his mother insisted on college graduates). But when he was born, the couple decided at the last minute that they wanted a girl. So he was offered in a dramatic early hours phone call to an Armenian machine operator and his wife, who brought him up. They sent him to college but he left at 17 because, as he said, ‘it was taking all of my working-class parents’ savings and I couldn’t see the value of it. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would work out OK’.
Crowd: Dozens of people gather at the Apple store in Beijing after news of Mr Jobs' deathHe was already an electronics buff, having been encouraged by an enthusiastic neighbour. And three years later in his parents’ garage, he and a college friend, Steve Wozniak, started putting electronic parts together. Ten years later Apple was worth £1.5billion and they had 4,000 employees.
Jobs had an informal style of blue jeans and black shirt. But far from being relaxed and easy going, he initiated a ruthless corporate culture at Apple. It was his diktat that Apple engineers working on sensitive projects are monitored constantly by cameras, and that misinformation should be occasionally passed on by executives to spot if any employee was disloyal enough to spread it.
He would shout at staff when things went wrong, fully aware that he was humiliating them. When in the summer of 2008 critics panned the MobileMe service – which synchronised information between Apple devices – he was so angry that he gathered the team in Building 4 on Apple’s campus and berated them. ‘You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,’ he bawled. ‘You should hate each other for having let each other down.’
As for his private life, despite his own uncertain start in life, he at first denied being the father of a girl born when he was 22 to his first serious girlfriend, a painter named Chris-Ann Brennan. For years she raised the child on state benefits and only after a court ordered a blood test did Jobs begin to pay towards her upkeep.
In 1991 he married blonde beauty Lauren Powell and they have three children. Before that he dated many famous women and even bought an elegant apartment at the top of New York’s San Remo building overlooking Central Park so that he could meet the ‘young, super-intelligent, artistic women’ he said were not to be found in California.
Technology: A young fan takes a picture of tributes to Apple's founder with her iPhoneHe never did anything without good reason. When in his twenties, he became the lover of folk singer Joan Baez, 16 years his senior and now 70, it was said to be because Baez had been the lover of Bob Dylan, with whom he was fixated.
Jobs never saw any contradiction in running a company that would grow to employ 50,000 people worldwide while being a Buddhist.
His compromise was to adopt a minimalist philosophy so severe that his mansion bedroom contained nothing but a bed, a chair, a Tiffany lamp and a picture of Albert Einstein. He was a vegetarian.
As for the challenges that face the brilliant company he created, Steve Jobs himself might have figured this was a good time to bow out.
In June 2005, a year after he was diagnosed with cancer, he addressed students at Stanford university.
‘No one wants to die,’ he told them. ‘Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.
‘And yet death is the destination we all share... And that is as it should be... It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.’
