Biography | Tim Cook — His First Product Event as Chief Executive Was in This Hall

On 4 October 2011 Tim Cook opened an event Apple called Let's Talk iPhone, in Town Hall at 4 Infinite Loop.

It was his first product launch as chief executive.

The board had given him the title on 24 August, when Steve Jobs moved to executive chairman.

Cook wore a navy shirt and jeans, not a black turtleneck.

He told the room it was a privilege to have spent nearly fourteen years at the company and that he was excited about the new role.

He also noted that the original iPod had been introduced in the same auditorium ten years earlier.

Phil Schiller, not Cook, unveiled the iPhone 4S.

The phone kept the iPhone 4 body and added an A5 chip, a revised antenna design, and the voice assistant later sold as Siri.

Cook opened the morning with store and sales figures: 357 stores in 11 countries, more than 300 million iPods sold, 45 million of them in the previous year.

He closed it as well.

Jobs, still chairman, was not on the stage.

He died the next day, 5 October 2011.

The date is part of why this room is remembered, and it is also why the morning should not be reduced to an ending.

Cook had already run day-to-day operations through earlier medical leaves.

What was new was the title and the fact that the man who had defined Apple's public events was no longer the person walking out first.

Town Hall remains inside IL4 on a working campus.

It is not a museum, and it is not open on a tourist schedule.

The company store and the Infinite Loop sign on the public side of the fence are what a visitor can actually stand next to.

Cover: the One Infinite Loop sign photographed on 4 September 2011, a month before the event.

The second photograph is Building 4, which contains Town Hall.

Photos: Joe Ravi, CC BY-SA 3.0; Yusuke Kawasaki, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.