Malcolm Owen
Two decades ago, Steve Jobs made a dent in the world with a moving and sensational commencement speech to Stanford graduates. You can now watch it in HD.
On June 12, 2005, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs took to the stage in front of Stanford's graduating class and gave a 15-minute speech. One that would become one of the most influential and impactful speeches to graduates in living memory.
To commemorate the event's 20th anniversary, the Steve Jobs Archive has footage of the speech. The video, published to YouTube on Thursday, has been enhanced in resolution, so it now plays back at 1080p and 60 frames per second via the streaming service.
It's not as low resolution and grainy as previously seen, but all you really need to do is hear the words.
An impactful speech
The commencement speech is one of the most memorable and referenced of its kind. Watched over 120 million times, it has made a major impact on many who have viewed it in the following years.
The Steve Jobs Archive even mentions how a clip from it was used by LeBron James to inspire the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2016.
For the founder of Apple, it was also one that didn't really discuss technology, with it instead covering three stories from Jobs' life. It covered "connecting the dots" in dropping out from Reed College, love and loss in embracing challenges, and death and the importance of living in the form of his cancer diagnosis.
The speech was impactful, but far from the originally expected one. He was the third choice of the students after Jon Stewart and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
There were also signs of typical student distractions, including beach balls and the obligatory game of "Commencement Bingo" being played. But, while they didn't realize at the time of the speech itself, they would certainly hear of its contents later on.
For Jobs, he gave advice to an audience about to embark on their adult lives. It turned out to be part of his legacy, one that holds up decades later.
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14 Comments
I wish they would remaster the 1984 Macintosh commercial and the Knowledge Navigator commercial.
What is funny is that was my graduating class but I had moved back to Florida in March to finish my last three credits online. I didn’t know that he gave the commencement speech until he passed and they were showing it on the news. I would have flown back for the event if I had known.
Starting at 0:50, whatever processing was done has added awful vertical stripes to his head. Through the rest of the video that I've glanced through, which is front view, the processing hints at trying to do the same. This can't be state of the art.