Jobs continued to work on Apple TV set after tenure as CEO

The call, according to Mossberg, started with Jobs explaining that he would still be involved with strategic ideas and would save one task for himself: a television. A press release was issued earlier that day, wherein it was announced that while Cook was taking over as CEO, Jobs would remain as chairman, director and employee of Apple.

Some people criticize modern Apple for not releasing as many game-changing products as it did under Jobs, CNBC’s Jon Fortt commented. But of course, Tim Cook’s Apple is absolutely different compared to how Steve Jobs’ was. Jobs said, “Well, it’s television …”

“If you would have asked me five minutes after we hung up, I would have said he was going to reinvent the whole TV set”, Mossberg said. “I want you to come out, in a few months, and I want to show it to you'”.

Jobs died two months later. We’d also note that some of Apple’s biggest wins were actually low-hanging fruit – the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and MacBook Air all entered markets with radically inferior competition (the iPad didn’t have much to compete with in terms of tablets, but Steve Jobs set it against the entire netbook category).

Rumours of an integrated Apple television date back to 2007 when the company was said to be committing research and development resources toward “large screen technologies”.

“I finally cracked it”, Jobs was quoted as saying.

Jobs downplayed Apple’s efforts as a “hobby” for years, and in 2010 publicly stated that Apple had no “viable go-to-market strategy” for the TV business, and reportedly told internal staff that “TV is a bad business”. The latest version features Siri integration and the specialised tvOS operating system with standalone App Store. He was planning on working on an Apple-branded TV that would re-invent television as we know it.