Steve Jobs fought a losing battle with cancer but his death certificate, released Monday by the Santa Clara County Public Health Department in San Francisco, California, revealed that the Apple co-founder's actual demise was caused by respiratory arrest.

First reported by The Associated Press on Monday, Jobs succumbed to numerous complications that resulted from his five-year battle with metastatic pancreas neuroendocrine tumor, with the death certificate declaring that Jobs' internal organs were mostly affected by the cancer cells.

The document also confirmed that Jobs died at his home in Palo Alto Wednesday last week and was buried Friday without further autopsies performed on his body.

The AP report also acknowledged that much of the details of the newly-released death certificate were first carried in a new story ran by Bloomberg News, providing glimpses of information that were absent on the official statement issued by Apple on the day of Jobs' death.

Jobs, together with Steve Wozniak, launched Apple in the late 1970s, starting off a tech firm that initially won the admiration of many for its innovation that allowed the general consumers to experience the power of personal computing.

Eventually, the two exited Apple in 1985 that left the tech company overtaken by its closest competitors and struggling for years until Jobs found his way back to the firm more than a decade after.

From there, Jobs presided over Apple's incredible resurrection that saw the company introducing series of devices that captivated not only its solid fan-base but also the rest of the world, catapulting the firm to its present stature as a tech titan and the most valuable tech brand in the world in terms of capitalisation.

Without him knowing it, Jobs passing virtually snatched media and consumer attention from the new iPhone 4S, which Apple launched on October 4.

While the release was generally met with hordes of failed expectations, with many decrying the new gadget's seeming inferiority with the torrents of 'iPhone 5' story leaks, Apple has reported that pre-orders for the handset already breached the one million mark, a feat that dwarfed the iPhone 4 debut last year.