Apple posts Steve Jobs memorial video, with appearances by Al Gore and Coldplay
Apple has posted a link on its homepage to an 81-minute video of the memorial service for company co-founder and epoch-defining superhuman Steve Jobs. The service, which was held last Wednesday on the company’s Cupertino campus, included appearances by current CEO Tim Cook and by Jonathan Ive, a.k.a. Apple’s iPod-creating design ninja. Former Vice President and Apple board member Al Gore also paid tribute to Jobs, and the service included performances by Norah Jones and Coldplay. Here are three highlights:
1. At 42:30, Gore’s speech takes a hard left turn into corporatese, when he explains that Jobs spent the last six or seven years preparing for his succession. “He has prepared and groomed the executive team to continue. They are the best in the world, bar none.” Then he exhorts the assembled Apple crowd to funnel their energies “full force into the creativity and passion that lives inside the insanely great products that you design, engineer, manufacture, and market.” It’s a weird back-to-business note to strike amidst the somber memorial, and the fact that Gore still sounds robotic (after all these years!) doesn’t help matters.
2. Conversely, Ive takes the stage at 48:00, and steals the show with deeply personal memories of Jobs that also serve to provide an insider’s perspective on the Master’s genius. Ive offers a vision of Jobs throwing out ideas in a boardroom: “Sometimes they were dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room… bold, crazy, magnificent ideas, or quiet simple ones which, in their subtlety, their detail, were utterly profound.” Ive also gets the crowd cackling when he describes what it was like to travel with the famously finicky Jobs: They’d check into a hotel, and Ive would wait patiently by the phone inside his room until Jobs called and said, “Hey Jony, this hotel sucks. Let’s go.”
3. Turns out that Steve Jobs was a big Coldplay fan, which either proves that he had his finger on the pulse of humanity or proves that he had zero musical taste, depending on your perspective. What’s undeniable is that the boys of Coldplay deliver a rousing mini-concert, starting at the 58 minute mark. Frontman Chris Martin kicks things off by saying, “We played this song for Steve ten years ago. He said it was s—. He said we’d never make it.” Cue a sped-up version of the band’s first hit single, “Yellow.” Sadly, we’ll never know Jobs’ opinions about Mylo Xyloto, but I’m willing to bet he would’ve recommended a title change.
Follow Darren on Twitter: @EWDarrenFranich
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