On the fourth anniversary of Steve Jobs’ death, ABC News obtained a never-before-seen video of Jobs which depicts a somewhat rare look at the former Apple CEO’s softer side. The video was provided by Apple and is perhaps intended to counteract some of the more negative depictions of the Apple co-founder that we’ve been seeing as of late in films such as Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine.
In the video below, filmed before a gathering of Apple employees the day before the iPhone was officially unveiled, we see a smiling and laid-back Jobs casually talking about his personal theory of business management, the iPhone, and even why he was prone to wear ripped jeans.
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“My theory of management is The Beatles,” Jobs explained. “Together, they helped amplify each other’s really good tendencies, and that’s true of any team. And we have a really great team here at Apple.
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At one point, Jobs implored everyone in attendance to go into an Apple retail store and just give a store employee a hug, a lighthearted remark which elicited a few smiles from an assembly of Apple heavyweights which included Tim Cook, Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, and Greg Joswiak.
To help celebrate Jobs’ life, a number of Apple executives yesterday penned touching tributes to the man they admired so much.
Bud Tribble’s essay reads in part:
Steve was a good friend. The boundaries between work and our friendship were not real formal. He went to my wedding, and I went to his wedding. Our kids went to the same school. Early in the first Mac project, I ended up in the hospital for a few days and Steve showed up. I tried to turn on the TV and it didn’t work so Steve got a screwdriver and climbed up behind the TV set and was trying to reattach the wires so that I could watch TV. That’s the kind of guy he was.
Steve was not a lecturer. If he really wanted to impart or teach you something, he would show you. In 1981, just when the original Mac team had formed — there were maybe a dozen people — we were still trying to figure out what we were building. What should it be? What should it do? What should it look like? And Steve came in one day and said, “We’re going to go on a field trip.” And we all thought it would be some team-building exercise. Then he said, “We’re going to San Francisco to the de Young museum. They have a Louis Comfort Tiffany exhibit and we’re going to just spend the whole day there, looking at what this guy did.”
As for depictions of Jobs in the media, you might recall that Tim Cook recently said that some of the more recent Steve Jobs oriented films were opportunistic in nature, a remark which elicited a scathing retort, and subsequent apology, from Steve Jobs screenwriter Aaron Sorkin.
With Sorkin’s Jobs biopic set for release in just a few days, The Wall Street Journal recently revealed that Laurene Powell Jobs and other folks close to Jobs had attempted to have the film canned.
Mr. Jobs’s allies, led by his widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, say the film “Steve Jobs,” and other recent depictions, play down his accomplishments and paint Mr. Jobs as cruel and inhumane. Ms. Jobs repeatedly tried to kill the film, according to people familiar with the conversations. She lobbied, among others, Sony Pictures Entertainment, which developed the script but passed on the movie for financial reasons, and Comcast Corp.’s Universal Pictures, which is releasing the $33.5 million production on Friday.
Thus far, early reviews of the film have been overwhelmingly positive. While some who know Jobs say that many of the ‘facts’ presented in the film are way off-base, the film reportedly does a solid job of capturing who Jobs was as a person.
“I think it’s a fine movie, brilliantly written and performed and full of humor and feeling,” famed Mac engineer Andy Hertzfeld told Re/Code earlier this week. “It deviates from reality everywhere — almost nothing in it is like it really happened — but ultimately that doesn’t matter that much. The purpose of the film is to entertain, inspire and move the audience, not to portray reality. It is cavalier about the facts but aspires to explore and expose the deeper truths behind Steve’s unusual personality and behavior, and it often but not always succeeds at that.”
