This is a long read, but it’ll fly by. Beautifully crafted with lots of photos (by Dan Winters) and anecdotes (expertly related by long-time Apple historian Steven Levy).
One bit from the very end:
Last December, Cook, Ive, and Apple PR head Steve Dowling met with Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve’s widow. At the time, the campus didn’t have a name. One option was to brand the entire site after the company’s late CEO, but that didn’t feel right. A more intimate honor would come from lending his name to the 1,000-seat theater in the southeast corner of the campus. Not only had Jobs thought hard about what the theater should look like, but it will also be the stage for product launches like those he had so famously made his own. “It’s on a hill, at one of the highest points on this land,” Cook says. “It felt like him.”
And so his name will be on the theater. But anyone searching for Steve Jobs’ fingerprints on Apple Park will find them elsewhere—in the glint off the Ring’s curves, in the sway of the trees, and in the thousands of other details we can and cannot see.
Can’t wait for my first visit.
I’m thinking about attending a future shareholder’s meeting…….
“And the campus’s opening comes at a point when, despite stellar earnings results, Apple has not launched a breakout product since Jobs’ death.”
Tim Cook during the Q2 2017 earnings call:
“In fact, when we combine Apple Watch, AirPods, and Beats headphones, our revenues from wearable products in the last four quarters was the size of a Fortune 500 company.”
So products worth as much as a Fortune 500 company don’t count as “breakout products”? What sort of impossibly-high bar is Wired setting? Once again a perfectly good article is ruined by the author’s overwhelming desire to fit the story to a preconceived narrative.