Tim Cook is smooth voiceover on new Apple green ad

Since Steve Jobs' death, you can argue that Apple has changed a lot or not at all.

There's one thing, though, that seems clear about the company under Tim Cook. It's become a little nicer. At least, outside of the courtroom.

Cook has decided to lend his own voice to that niceness by doing something that Jobs ultimately refused to do -- put his vocals to an ad.

In a new ad released Monday, Cook's own voice can be heard extolling Apple's highly human intentions to be ever greener, ever more conscious of the environment and its perilous future.

"We have a long way to go and a lot to learn," says Cook. But he's convinced that Apple will "leave the world better than we found it."

Yes, it isn't just Google that's doing things for your own good. It's Apple too.

Cook claims that making the world better is "in our DNA." But "better can't be better if it doesn't consider everything."

Naturally, there will be those who wonder whether Apple always considers everything when it walls off its ecosystem from those who don't entirely buy into it.

Still, Cook's decision to perform the voiceover himself is surely a small statement that Apple is now his company, embodying his own vision.

Jobs was once persuaded to record a voiceover for the brilliant "Here's To The Crazy Ones" ad (video below). In the end, he is said not to have wanted the ad to be in any way about him.

Perhaps he also realized that Richard Dreyfuss' voiceover was far too brilliant to pass up.

This new Apple ad coincides with Earth Day, April 22. It's accompanied by a revamped environment page on the Apple Web site. This reveals that today's iMacs use 97 percent less electricity in sleep mode than the original versions.

It also features the definitive statement: "We believe climate change is real."

Climate change is something that Cook seems to be trying to effect at Apple too. The only question, at least for some critics, is whether this will make the company better.