Did Steve Jobs Work on iPhone 5 on iPhone 4S Launch Day?

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A couple of recent reports suggested that not only did the late Steve Jobs leave behind a line-up of future products for the company but that he was actively involved in the development of the iPhone 5/6 – a totally redesigned smartphone expected to be launched next year.

Today we hear from another source that Jobs was indeed dedicated to his work even after he resigned from the CEO position. In a recent interview, Masayoshi Son, CEO of Japanese carrier Softbank recalled a brief moment that occurred on the iPhone 4S launch day, a day ahead of Jobs’ death:

I visited Apple for the announcement of the iPhone 4S [at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California]. When I was having a meeting with Tim Cook, he said, ‘Oh Masa, sorry I have to quit our meeting.’ I said, ‘Where are you going?’ He said, ‘My boss is calling me.’ That was the day of the announcement of the iPhone 4S. He said that Steve is calling me because he wants to talk about their next product. And the next day, he died.

At the time, Jobs was in a poor state of health, a fact already described recently by Walter Isaacson, his biographer. But nevertheless he appears to have passionately kept on working on Apple-related projects from home. Unless Tim Cook is ready to reveal what Jobs wanted to speak with him that day, we may never find out what that “next product” is. It may be the next-gen iPhone, but it may as well be the upcoming iPad 3, which is the next product we expect Apple to launch at some point in early 2012.

“Steve Jobs,” the official biography of Apple’s iconic leader is scheduled to hit stores and virtual eBook stores on October 24. While it will surely not offer us many details about Apple’s product launch strategy it will definitely contain plenty of personal stories, like the one Softbank’s CEO shared with the world, that will shed more light on the kind of person Jobs was, on top of what we already know about him.