Biography | Tim Cook — He Brought the Bigger Phone Back to the Hall Jobs Had Used

On 9 September 2014 Tim Cook took the stage of the Flint Center for the Performing Arts on the De Anza College campus in Cupertino.

Steve Jobs had pulled the first Macintosh out of a bag in this hall on 24 January 1984.

He had unveiled the iMac here on 6 May 1998.

Cook's morning was the company's return to that room for iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, Apple Pay, and the first public look at Apple Watch.

The 4.7-inch iPhone 6 and the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus were the first time Apple had broken the four-inch screen line it had kept since iPhone 5.

U2 appeared at the end to give the album Songs of Innocence to iTunes customers.

The Watch would not ship until April 2015.

Flint Center opened in 1971 as a civic and campus hall, not an Apple theatre.

The Foothill-De Anza board voted on 10 June 2019 to close it after seismic and accessibility estimates topped $49 million.

Demolition began in October 2024.

What stands at the pin today is a cleared site off Stevens Creek Boulevard, with the Flint Center parking garage still to the west and still carrying the name.

A visitor should not expect the auditorium.

The 1984 Macintosh morning is already pinned at this coordinate as a technology-history memory.

This one is the morning Cook chose the same hall, thirty years on, for a larger phone and a watch.

Cover: the Flint Center photographed before demolition.

The second photograph shows Cook on this stage with U2 on 9 September 2014.

Photos: Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 3.0; gilipollastv, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.