“Steve cared,” Cook continues. “He cared deeply about things. Yes, he was very passionate about things, and he wanted things to be perfect. And that was what was great about him. He wanted everyone to do their best work. He believed that small teams were better than large teams, because you could get a lot more done. And he believed that picking the right person was a hundred times better than picking somebody who was a little short of being right. All of those things are really true. A lot of people mistook that passion for arrogance. He wasn’t a saint. I’m not saying that. None of us are. But it’s emphatically untrue that he wasn’t a great human being, and that is totally not understood.

“The Steve that I met in early ’98 was brash and confident and passionate and all of those things. But there was a soft side of him as well, and that soft side became a larger portion of him over the next thirteen years. You’d see that show up in different ways. There were different employees and spouses here that had health issues, and he would go out of his way to turn heaven and earth to make sure they had proper medical attention. He did that in a major way, not in a minor, ‘Call me and get back to me if you need my help’ kind of way.

“He had the courage to admit he was wrong, and to change, a quality which many people at that level, who have accomplished that much, lack. You don’t see many people at that level who will change directions even though they should. He wasn’t beholden to anything except a set of core values. Anything else he could walk away from. He could do it faster than anyone I’d ever seen before. It was an absolute gift. He always changed. Steve had this ability to go through a learning curve quickly, more quickly than anybody I’ve known, about such a wide variety of things.

“The Steve I knew was the guy pestering me to have a social life, not because he was being a pest, but because he knew how important family was in his life, and he wanted it for me, too,” continues Cook, who came out publicly as a gay man in 2014. (Steve and others at the company had known this for years, of course.) “One day he calls my mom—he doesn’t even know my mom, she lives in Alabama. He said he was looking for me, but he knows how to find me! And he talked to her about me. There are lots of these things where you saw the very soft or caring or feeling or whatever you want to call it side of him. He had that gene. Someone who’s viewing life only as a transactional relationship with people … doesn’t do that.”

EVENTUALLY STEVE DID get a liver transplant. He had also registered on another list in Memphis, Tennessee, which was perfectly legal; the only requirements to get on an out-of-state list were that he could make his way to the hospital within eight hours of being told that a liver was available—since Steve had a private jet, he could do so—and that he be judged healthy enough to recover from the surgery by a team of doctors from the admitting hospital. He and Laurene flew to Memphis for the surgery on March 21, 2009. Because of complications, he required a second surgery a couple of days later. He and Laurene remained in Memphis for two excruciating months, during which things were so touch-and-go that relatives and close friends such as Jony Ive, Mona Simpson, Steve’s lawyer George Riley, and others came to visit and perhaps say goodbye to him. Ive even brought a special present from the Apple design team—a meticulous miniature aluminum replica of the Macbook Pro that would ship in June. The designers had made these nano-models for Steve after every product release. Given the circumstances, this one was special.

Steve survived, of course. He later told Bob Iger that he had considered leaving Apple after the operation, to spend more time with his children at home. But, as Eddy Cue says, “Steve really just had two things he cared about in his life, Apple—and to some extent, Pixar—and his family.” He needed both. He returned to work, and just as he had after his 2004 operation, he did so with vigor. He had a new milestone he wanted to achieve before he died: the introduction of the iPad.

DEVELOPING THE IPAD was easier, technologically, than creating the iPod or the iPhone. In the first instance, the team had had to learn an utterly new way to operate. In the case of the iPhone, Apple pushed the personal computer revolution to its pinnacle, by melding three devices into one handheld supercomputer. Now, armed with the experience of those two battles, Steve and his team were able to create something whose attributes were ethereal and unexpected. Back in 2004, Steve had shifted Project Purple away from the tablet and toward the phone. By doing so, he ensured that Apple’s tablet device would be a line extension of the iPhone; when his team turned to building the iPad, they maximized an iPhone, rather than opt to minimize an iMac. That meant using ARM-based microprocessors, which are common in smartphones, rather than the more power-hungry Intel chips that drive many computers. That meant adopting the iPhone’s multi-touch screen and virtual keyboard. Perhaps most important of all—and most ironic, given Steve’s initial resistance—the iPad would benefit enormously from the iTunes App Store. The iPad gave software developers a much more powerful target to shoot for than the iPhone, mainly because the larger screen made it possible and practical to do some really cool things that you could not do on a pocket-sized device. Often sold at the same low price points as iPhone apps, these cool new iPad apps seemed like an even better deal as they exploded on those bigger screens. The iPad multiplied the importance of the App Store, and the influence of the new market and business model for software that it had created.

With the one-two punch of the iPhone and the iPad, Apple had completely reshaped the business of making and selling consumer software. Where once upon a time developers had to price their software applications so that they might make a profit from the sale of a few thousand copies, they now could sell into a market of hundreds of millions of people. This tremendous opportunity has led to all kinds of developments that never would have even had a glimmer of a chance in a smaller market. Name what you want to do now, and there is probably an app (or two or three or ten) for that. That wasn’t true in the PC world, because the price points necessary to achieve profitability on a much smaller volume of sales were simply too high.

Looked at in the context of Steve’s career as a technologist, the iPad is not as significant a product as the iPhone. But in some ways, it is the most elegant evocation of some of his enduring goals: to create technology that is a window into the limitless world of information, and to create technology that is so simple and so powerful that it basically disappears. His sense of those essential goals is what distinguished him from the more tech-savvy hobbyists back at the start of his career. His restless desire to reach that goal had betrayed him more than once, causing him to try to leap before the technology was ready even to walk. But by the time he and his team got around to creating the iPad, he had learned enough, finally, to make the technology essentially invisible. A true artist, he’d finally hidden all evidence of his labor.

Steve’s sense of pleasure and satisfaction with this outcome was evident on January 27, 2010, when he introduced the iPad at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. This time the stage was set with a small couch and a table, props that weren’t the standard for his product demos. When Steve walked onto the stage, looking gaunt, he received, as always, a standing ovation. He paced confidently and energetically as he proudly recounted some of the company’s achievements. A slide of him with Woz from the early days was projected above him as the statistics rolled out: 250 million iPods sold; 3 billion downloads from the App Store in a year and a half; revenues exceeding $50 billion annually. Apple, he explained, is now a mobile device company; in fact, by revenues it is the largest mobile device company in the world.