When Steve Jobs walked on to the stage at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center in January, it capped the most remarkable comeback in modern business history.
It wasn’t simply a matter of the illness that had sidelined him for half the year before, leaving him severely emaciated and eventually requiring a liver transplant. Little more than a decade earlier, both Mr Jobs’ career and Apple, the company he had co-founded, were widely considered washed up, their relevance to the future of technology written off both in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street.
By the start of this year, however, the rebound was complete. The level of anticipation whipped up in advance of the January event was unusual even by Mr Jobs’ own, impressive standards.