Apple's late co-founder Steve Jobs may have been working until the day before his death, according to an anecdote shared by the CEO of a Japanese telecommunications firm.
PC Mag reports that SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son was in a one-on-one meeting with Apple CEO Tim Cook on the day that Apple announced the iPhone 4S. As Masayoshi Son explained in an interview with John Ross — the U.S. Ambassador to Japan — last weekend, the meeting was cut short when Cook's phone rang:
He said, "Oh Masa, sorry I have to quit our meeting." I asked, " Why? Where are you going?' He said, 'Well, my boss is calling me.' So that was the day of the announcement of the iPhone 4S. And he said that Steve is calling [him] because he wants to talk about their next product. And the next day, he died. As you know."
This anecdote fits in with prior reports which claimed that Jobs played a key role in the creation of the next-generation iPhone (which most believe will be called the iPhone 5). According to Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw, that particular product "was the last project that Steve Jobs was intimately involved with from concept to final design."
It's worth noting that we don't know how far Jobs' involvement in future product design and planning really went, nor do we have details regarding exactly what he and Cook might've discussed on the day preceding his death.
But we do have a video of Masayoshi Son's touching retelling of what occurred on the day he met with Tim Cook and his thoughts on what that reveals about Steve Jobs:
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