Christina Passariello, WSJ. Magazine:

Apple Park is unlike any other product Ive has worked on. There will be only one campus—in contrast to the ubiquity of Apple’s phones and computers—and it doesn’t fit in a pocket or a hand. Yet Ive applied the same design process he brings to technological devices: prototyping to minimize any issues with the end result and to narrow what he calls the delta between the vision and the reality of a project. Apple Park is also the last major project Ive worked on with Steve Jobs, making it more personal for the man Jobs once called his “spiritual partner.”

So far, so good. But:

With Apple Park, Ive is ensconced as master of the house, which means he has also inherited the burden of proving that Apple’s best days aren’t behind it. Apple hasn’t had a breakthrough product since Jobs died. The iPhone’s sales growth has stalled, and expectations are high that a 10th-anniversary phone will arrive later this year and will be markedly more advanced than previous versions. In other technologies, from digital assistants to driverless vehicles to augmented and virtual reality, Apple seems to lag other tech giants, including Google, Amazon and Tesla. Its new voice-activated speaker, HomePod, unveiled in June, will arrive on the market in December, three years after Amazon’s Echo.

This “what have you done for me lately” journalism does a disservice, is incredibly shortsighted. Products like Apple Watch and AirPods aside, spend some time with ARKit to see a true breakthrough at work, a technology that will enable a generation of developers to stand on the shoulder of giants, to build things that would have been impractical, if not impossible before.

But I digress:

Like other Ive designs, Apple Park seems poised to become an icon. In an acknowledgement that the campus will attract interest beyond its employees, there will be a visitor center and a store selling items unique to Apple Park.

And:

Ive joined Apple half a lifetime ago, in his mid-20s, when the company was at the brink of death. One of his early designs, the candy-colored iMac, was rejected by executives. Ive stashed it away until Jobs returned to the company in 1997, after a 12-year hiatus; it became an instant point of connection between the two men and was put into production soon thereafter.

And:

When J.J. Abrams was working on Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Ive mentioned that he “would love to see a lightsaber that is rougher, spitting sparks,” Abrams says. The director, who says he and Ive were already fans of each other’s work when they met at a dinner four years ago, applied Ive’s suggestion to character Kylo Ren’s weapon. “His lightsaber was as imperfect and unpredictable as the character,” says Abrams. (The inspiration is mutual: Ive told Abrams that he had the look of the original Stormtroopers in mind when he designed Apple’s earbuds.)

These quotes are just the tip of the iceberg. The article goes on to highlight many features of Apple Park intercut with quotes from Laurene Powell Jobs, Sir Jony, and Tim Cook. This is worth reading, worth the price of a Wall Street Journal subscription, or a trip to your newsstand to pick up a paper copy of the WSJ. Magazine (this is this week’s cover story).