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Apple leaders remember an 'unselfish' Steve Jobs after criticizing movie portrayals

Apple leaders remember an 'unselfish' Steve Jobs after criticizing movie portrayals

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With yet another movie coming out that casts a critical eye to Steve Jobs, BuzzFeed reports that Apple's leaders have taken time to set the record straight on the fourth anniversary of the iconic CEO's death. Along with a memo to staff, Cook, as well as Eddy Cue and original Macintosh team member Bud Tribble, all wrote brief essays for the company's employees explaining how they knew the Apple founder, extolling his best qualities and the connection they felt to him.

The essays were all published on the company intranet AppleWeb. Here's Eddy Cue's:

Working with him, I always felt that there was a personal connection. It wasn’t just work. And in a way, sometimes he was a brother; sometimes he was a father figure, depending on what it was. But it was a family member nonetheless. And it was somebody you didn’t want to disappoint. I’ve never felt that way about anybody else that I’ve worked with. You feel that way about your family. You don’t wan’t to disappoint your dad, you may not want to disappoint your bother or your kids or your wife. But you generally don’t feel that way about your boss, per se. There was a different feeling. He had that. He created that. And I think that’s part of the personal touch of the relationship that at least I felt I had with him around it.

That was the person he was, the person I knew. There were obviously times where we disagreed, fought, and other things — like any relationship has. But he was a person who really cared.

— Eddy

"He was a person who really cared."

Apple has, appropriately, made a tradition of remembering Steve Jobs' importance to the company and to technology at large since his passing in 2011. However, the increased focus on Jobs' goodness this year — again, "a person someone who really cared" — is a timely counterpoint to the withering critiques he has received in recent months. Alex Gibney's Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine was called "mean-spirited" by Eddy Cue after it debuted at SXSW. More recently, Tim Cook told Stephen Colbert that Hollywood's drive to portray Jobs on-screen in a harsh light was "opportunistic," earning a swift rebuke from Steve Jobs writer Aaron Sorkin. (Sorkin later apologized.) However the public chooses to remember the founder, Apple clearly is doing all it can to make sure the company remembers him internally as a positive force for innovation in the world.