Biography | Steve Jobs — The Last Time He Walked Onstage at Moscone West

On 6 June 2011 Steve Jobs stepped onto the keynote stage at Moscone West for the last time.

The building at 800 Howard Street was already the room where he had announced the iPhone on 9 January 2007.

This morning was Worldwide Developers Conference, not a phone launch.

The hall of more than 5,000 developers stood as he walked out.

He had been on medical leave since January.

He looked thinner than he had at the iPad 2 event in March, and he did not stay on the stage for the whole keynote.

Phil Schiller, Scott Forstall, and the rest of the executive group carried Mac OS X Lion and iOS 5.

Jobs came back to talk about iCloud, the service meant to stop people from wiring a phone to a computer just to keep music and mail in sync.

He was onstage for less than half an hour of a nearly two-hour morning.

He did not call it a farewell.

He resigned as chief executive on 24 August 2011 and died on 5 October.

Moscone West still stands and still runs conferences that have nothing to do with Apple.

The company left Macworld after 2009 and now launches products in Cupertino.

A visitor can walk the glass lobby at Fourth and Howard without seeing a plaque for iCloud or for the last keynote.

The pin is the same building as the 2007 iPhone announcement, a different morning.

Cover: Moscone West dressed for WWDC on 5 June 2011, the day before the keynote.

Photo: Anton Zelenov, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.