You have to think at a deeper level to come up with something that promotes collaboration and openness and serenity.” You know, we could all architect those fairly easily. “And it does lead the architecture to be these rectangular blocks” – emphasis here for the obvious distaste with which he says those two words – “on a campus. “There’s very much an underappreciation of the power of the venue that people work in, I think,” Cook says, gesturing around the third-floor cafe we’re sitting in. In the Apple way, it’s designed to be both beautiful and useful and unlike other things – better, even – that people have designed for the same purpose. The campus runs completely on renewable energy, powered by solar panels and biogas fuel cells, cost about £4.2 billion to build, and wears the fingerprints of each of Apple’s saints: Jobs, of course, who conceived of the rough plans before his death Ive, who realised Jobs’s vision in collaboration with his own team at Apple and architects from Foster + Partners and Cook himself, who was running the company by the time the thing was finished.Īpple Park is conspicuously inconspicuous a monument to a company that purports to be sceptical of monuments. When the weather is nice, you can open certain parts of the walls right up. Outside the ring are basketball courts, football pitches, volleyball courts, a fitness centre, little piles of communal bikes. California hills visible in the distance. Plus thousands of oaks! Winding paths that change in elevation. In the middle of the continuous loop, there is a courtyard where in the winter the orchards are skeletal but still: orchards! Vast stands of plum and apple trees. The building itself, four stories of curved glass and three underground levels that stretch for nearly a mile, has the look of a spaceship that was courteous enough to come down to Earth and land without disturbing the landscape. Apple Park is a place that looks like it came out of nowhere that cannot possibly have come out of nowhere. I always joke with him that he’d be a great poker player, because he’d have four aces and no one would know.” “If you’re looking to make your decision or your beliefs based on reading his facial expressions, you’re probably not going to be good at that. “He’s very hard to read,” says Eddy Cue, who has been at Apple since 1989 and now leads its services division. (Cook will not, to be clear, confirm or deny the existence of such a thing to a journalist, though he will happily talk about the… potential… of such a device.) And yet Cook is, in the wealth of biographies and hagiography that has grown up around Apple since its founding, an enigma still. Rumour suggests this headset is imminent. Lately, rumour has coalesced around that thing being a headset, perhaps called the Reality Pro, with capabilities for virtual and augmented reality. It is his responsibility to protect what the company has already built while presiding over Apple’s next big thing. But it is Cook who has run the company since Jobs’s death, in 2011, Cook who has presided over the astronomical growth in the value of the stock, and Cook who is shaping the future of Apple today. For these achievements, Jobs, who cofounded Apple and spearheaded the development of most of its signature products, is worshipped like a god, and Jonathan Ive, Apple’s erstwhile design head, is worshipped like a demigod. (At the time of writing, it’s worth more than £1.68 trillion at one moment last year, that number was £2.5 trillion, a figure roughly equal to the gross domestic product of the UK.)Īpple’s inventions – starting with 1976’s Apple I and 1977’s Apple II, and continuing through the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch, and AirPods – have arguably done more to change the basic way that humans go through their day than those of any other company in the past 50 years. The overall sensation he attempts to impart is one of normalcy, of proportion, despite the fact that most days, Apple, which employs about 165,000 people, is the most valuable company in the world. Most days, he leaves the office at 6.30 or 7pm. He does this not to intimidate, though there is perhaps a standard, an expectation of those working for him, lurking there as well: “If something’s really shallow, you find that people can’t explain it very well.” Like Jobs once did, he sometimes takes meetings on the move, walking around the campus. “I’m curious, and I’m curious about how things work,” he says. Regular meetings, different standing engagements with different parts of the company. “I try not to let the urgent take over the day,” Cook says. He is not a leader who is drawn to crisis or conflict, two climates his predecessor, Steve Jobs, seemed at times to thrive in.
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