Biography | Tim Cook — He Put a Price on the Watch in the Theater Where Jobs Had Sat on a Couch

On 9 March 2015 Tim Cook took the stage of the theater at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for an event Apple called Spring Forward.

Steve Jobs had sat on a leather couch in this same hall five years earlier to introduce the iPad.

Cook's morning was not a first look at the Watch.

That had happened at Flint Center on 9 September 2014.

This was the morning the company said what it would cost and when it would ship.

The aluminum Apple Watch Sport would start at $349.

The stainless-steel Apple Watch ran from $549 to $1,049 depending on the band.

The 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition started at $10,000 and would be sold in limited numbers at selected stores.

Pre-orders were set for 10 April in nine countries.

Store sales were set for 24 April.

Battery life was given as 18 hours for a typical day.

The same event introduced a 12-inch MacBook with a single USB-C port and announced HBO Now on Apple TV.

Christy Turlington Burns came on stage to talk about training for a half marathon with the Watch.

The theater at 700 Howard Street, opened in 1993, still runs dance and film most weeks and is now billed as the Blue Shield of California Theater at YBCA.

Apple stopped using it for launches after it built a theater of its own at Apple Park.

A visitor can walk into the lobby on an ordinary night and see a performance, not a product keynote.

Cover: the theater entrance.

The second photograph is an Apple Watch Sport photographed on 10 April 2015, the pre-order day announced in this room.

Photos: BrokenSphere, CC BY-SA 3.0; thomersch, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.