PALO ALTO, Calif. — Sunday was the third anniversary of Steve Jobs’ death. I drove my family down from San Francisco to Palo Alto to see if anyone had left tributes at his house or the local Apple store, which were scenes of remarkable memorials following his death in 2011.
The first place we visited was Steve’s local Whole Foods grocery for a sandwich. Steve would walk a few blocks to the store barefoot for a smoothie. He was rumored to have a private office nearby where he occasionally worked. Whole Foods was bustling, though no one was in line at the smoothie counter.
A few blocks away, at Steve’s house, there were no memorials outside. After his death in 2011, the sidewalk outside his house was covered in flowers, candles and messages. Fans kept vigil for several days. On Sunday, there was just one small group taking pictures of the property and the white Tesla parked and charging outside. Like Steve’s car when he was alive, the Tesla had no license plate (on the front, at least).
In downtown Palo Alto, there were no memorials at the expansive new Apple Store, which opened in 2012. An employee said there had been no flowers or tributes, and that officially, no one at the store had mentioned the anniversary. “Everyone remembered him in his or her own way,” the staffer said. On Friday, Apple CEO Tim Cook sent out a heartfelt email to all of Apple’s staff. The staffer directed us to the old Palo Alto store two blocks down the street, which is now closed. “If anyone has left flowers, that’s where they would be,” he said. But there were no flowers at the old store. In 2011, the store’s windows were completely covered in sticky note tributes.
Steve is buried at Alta Mesa Memorial Park, Palo Alto’s only non-denominational cemetery. It’s a big and well-tended cemetery, but it struck me as an unlikely place for one of the world’s richest businessmen to to be buried. Unlike Palo Alto, which is a wealthy town, full of expensive houses, Alta Mesa is modest and low-key. It’s an unassuming place. There are no giant mausoleums or ostentatious gravestones. Most graves are marked with simple plaques laying flat on the ground. It’s a cemetery for ordinary people, and it appeared to be well-visited. There were flowers left on graves everywhere.
Steve’s grave is unmarked, but in 2011, just after he was buried, some Italian bloggers figured out the likely location by identifying a freshly covered plot. It’s a few feet from the grave of David Packard, one of Hewlett-Packard’s founders and a Silicon Valley pioneer. Steve was given his first summer job at HP. There are some other technologists buried at Alta Mesa, including William Shockley, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist credited with co-developing the transistor (but now disgraced as a “Hitlerite” and eugenic sperm donor).
Near Packard’s grave, someone had left two bouquets of flowers and some printouts with Apple designs on one side and writing in Mandarin on the other side. They appeared to be in the wrong location, if the Italian bloggers are correct.
In death as in life, Steve is still shrouded in secrecy.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander is an expert on:
Apple and Apple history
Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Tim Cook and Apple leadership
Apple community
iPhone and iOS
iPad and iPadOS
Mac and macOS
Apple Watch and watchOS
Apple TV and tvOS
AirPods
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
12 responses to “Visiting the cemetery where Steve Jobs was laid to rest”
Leander thank you so much for going there for all of us. I seriously appreciate you doing that and I didn’t even know I would until I saw your article. Thank you so much! Sending all my love you guys’ way. Love listening every week and reading every day.
So the question is: did you leave something yourself Leander?
@shaunearsom:disqus No, I didn’t leave anything.
Nice follow up. Sad to think about… and not just Steve, but all visionaries who have come and gone.
Frankly I find this mawkish behaviour utterly distasteful.
Tracking down his grave through bloggers.. I mean really.. Honestly.. Why do you think they didn’t have it marked? To avoid this sort of behaviour.
Surely he should be allowed to be left in peace now.
William D Left in peace? We didn’t desecrate his gravesite or anything. We were very quiet and respectful. I was curious to see if his family had marked his gravesite — and to see if anyone had left tributes or flowers, which were numerous only three years ago.
I thought there was a distinct possibility that people would leave tributes, and was a little disappointed that no one had. It was business as usual, which I suppose isn’t the worst thing. Life goes on. And kinda fitting to Jobs, who wasn’t particularly sentimental. He wasn’t one to look back.
Thanks for taking us along Leander. I think it’s a peaceful, loving thing to visit the gravesite of a loved one, whether you knew them personally or not. Steve’s lasting effect on a lot of people’s lives deserves a remembrance in whatever way you see fit. Nice piece.
I suspect the family didn’t want to turn Steve’s last resting place into a shrine for Apple fans on a pilgrimage.
@Shaun That might be true, but I think there’s little danger it will turn into something Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris. There weren’t any people at the grave when we visited, and evidence that only one other person had visited recently (whomever left the bouquet). And this was on the anniversary of his death, on a Sunday afternoon, which I would have though a likely day to draw a crowd if one was ever going to appear.
Perhaps the absence of a marker is the reason it’s not on the pilgrimage trail, but the cemetery is also not easy to get to without a car. Hard to say. I think it’s somewhat a shame there’s no marker. In the short term, yes, it prevents the grave turning into a shrine, but in the long term, it’s important that there’s some kind of memorial to the man. Think of all the historical gravesites around the world. They are important places for people to visit, to commemorate historical personages. I’d like to see a permanent marker to a life that had such a huge and profound impact.
It’s a difficult one. I’m one of those people who like to visit the graves of historical figures to pay respect. It would be nice to have a permanent memorial and yes it does seems sad that such a influential figure has such a simple resting place but I guess that’s what his family wanted. It would be nice if the state of California created a memorial garden somewhere with statues and plaques to honour the pioneers of silicon valley away from their actual graves. Being such a private person I think Steve would have preferred that.
I like that his house isn’t the typical modern, pretentious, spotless house that our
youth is becoming tight asses so they can afford their mortgages on.
I hate this generation always wanting better things than each other. Mines cleaner than yours, mines bigger than yours. Who cares! That’s a nice house! Nice trees! not spotless! Nice one!
The key to what you said is “our” youth. Maybe those who are raising the youth are to blame for their behavior.