Steve Jobs in 2011 in one of his last public appearances before his death. Photo / Getty Images
Steve Jobs in 2011 in one of his last public appearances before his death. Photo / Getty Images
Apple CEO Tim Cook still remembers the last movie he ever saw with Steve Jobs before he succumbed to cancer: the sentimental sports flick Remember the Titans.
"I was so surprised he wanted to watch that movie," Cook recalls in the new biography Becoming Steve Jobs.
The 2000 film starring Denzel Washington tells the true story of a newly integrated Virginia high school football team in 1971.
"I was like, 'Are you sure?' Steve was not interested in sports at all. And we watched and we talked about a number of things and I left thinking that he was pretty happy," according to a CNN review of the book.
Five days after Cook and Jobs' movie night, the co-founder of Apple passed away at his Palo Alto, California, estate from complications from pancreatic cancer. He was 56 years old.
The new biography of the late Apple CEO by veteran tech journalists Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli traces his decades-long evolution from a "reckless" young inventor tinkering with early computer models into the leader of a global tech giant.
The book, based on numerous in-depth interviews with Jobs' colleagues, friends and competitors, also allows a glimpse into the Apple CEO's inner sanctum in the final weeks of his life.
Remember the Titans. Photo / Disney
Cook, who took the reins of Apple in August 2011, less than two months before his mentor's death, described to the authors of the biography the moment Jobs invited him over to his house to offer him the top job.
"He told me he had decided that I should be CEO. I thought then that he thought he was going to live a lot longer when he said this, because we got into a whole level of discussion about what would it mean for me to be CEO with him as a chairman.
"I asked him, 'What do you really not want to do that you're doing?'" Cook recalled. "He says, 'You make all the decisions.' I go, 'Wait. Let me ask you a question.'
"I tried to pick something that would incite him. So I said, 'You mean that if I review an ad and I like it, it should just run without your OK?' And he laughed and said, 'Well, I hope you'd at least ask me!'"
Cook said that every time he visited Jobs, his boss appeared to be on the mend, and he asked him two or three times whether his decision to step down as the CEO was final. Jobs never wavered.
According to Tim Cook, his boss wanted a successor who would not try to copy his style of leadership but rather use his own talents for the good of the company - a model he referred to as a "Beatles concept".
Tim Cook and Steve Jobs, with Apple marketing boss Phil Schiller in 2007. Photo / Getty Images
In an interesting titbit, the book reveals that Jobs' favorite Beatle was John Lennon, and that he reportedly named his company after Beatles' Apple Corps Record.
In the weeks leading up to his passing, Jobs also met up with John Lasseter, chief creative officer at Pixar, the award-winning digital animation company founded by Jobs and later sold to Disney for $7.4billion.
"We talked all about Pixar... And then I kinda looked at him and he said, 'Yeah I need to get a nap now.' I got up to go, and then I stopped, and I looked at him and came back. I gave him a big hug, and a kiss, and I said, 'Thank you. Thank you for everything you've done for me,'" Lasseter recalled.
The Pixar animator described in one passage how a few years after Steve Jobs' death, he ran into Tim Cook at a birthday party for their late boss' widow, Laurene Powell.
The two men bonded over how much they both missed Jobs, and Lasseter confided in the new Apple CEO that he still had his late boss' number on his phone.
"I said, 'I'll never be able to take that out.' And Tim took out his iPhone and showed me - he still had Steve's number in his phone, too," he said.
In the memoir, which was released this week, Tim Cook did not miss an opportunity to take a swipe at the unauthorized Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, which debuted just weeks after the Apple co-founder's death.
"You get the feeling that [Steve's] a greedy, selfish egomaniac. It didn't capture the person," fumed Cook. "The person I read about there is somebody I would never have wanted to work with over all this time. Life is too short."
The co-authors of Becoming Steve Jobs also interviewed Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who was among the people who paid a visit to his one-time rival's Palo Alto mansion not long before his death.
"We just talked about the things we'd done, and where we thought things were headed," Gates recalled, graciously adding that his competitor-turned-friend was the one person who had the biggest impact on the personal computer history.
