Regarding Jony Ive and Apple Park

Christina Passariello scored a profile on Apple's Chief Creative Officer, Jony Ive, and AC2, the campus officially named Apple Park. And it's terrific.

From The Wall Street Journal:

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."

Yet another glowing neon sign pointing out how fallacious the whole "Jony Ive has checked out" narrative really was.

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 is an incredibly odd paragraph, almost as though someone, somewhere, forced some "fair and balanced" negativity into the profile, and so the laziest list imaginable was added — perhaps as a way of pointing out just how silly its inclusion was.

iPhone sales growth has stalled because a) Apple is running out of people to buy iPhones and b) there are not yet Apple Stores on Mars. Apple has had breakthrough products since iPhone, they simply didn't sell as many units as iPhone — because nothing else in the industry has even sold as many units as the iPhone.

Likewise, Apple "lagged" behind other tech giants with phones and tablets, and that seems to have worked out fine for them. Moreover, HomePod is a speaker with Siri control. Amazon didn't introduce a speaker three years ago. At least not a good one.

Norman Foster, whose architecture firm was hired by Apple to build the headquarters at a reported cost of $5 billion, calls him "a poet." Other designers are "amazing essayists, but the difference between an essay and a poem is that you really have to work harder at the poem. It's much more distilled, it's much more the essence," Foster says. "He works tirelessly at the detail, evolving, improving, refining. For me, that makes him a poet."

As apt an illumination of Ive as I've ever read.

Ive told Abrams that he had the look of the original Stormtroopers in mind when he designed Apple's earbuds.

Perfect.

Ive, tracing an infinity sign in the air, says they considered complex forms, including a trilobal design, a sort of giant fidget spinner.

That would have been hilarious.

THE THOUSANDS OF employees at Apple Park will need to bend slightly to Ive's vision of the workplace. Many will be seated in open space, not the small offices they're used to. Coders and programmers are concerned that their work surroundings will be too noisy and distracting. Whiteboards—synonymous with Silicon Valley brainstorming—are built into floor-to-ceiling sliding doors in the central area of each pod, but "some of the engineers are freaking out" that it isn't enough, says Whisenhunt. iPhones will be the primary mode of communication for everyone, though individuals can also lobby for a desk phone, if they feel they have a need for one.

This is true. It's also true that some employees will still be getting offices. Including a whole separate building of them. (One where some of my favorite work at Apple gets done.)

A diagram lays out where the different divisions will be located in the main building: The fourth floor will be home to the executive suites (including Ive's design studio), the watch team and part of the group working on Siri, which will also occupy a fraction of the third floor. The Mac and iPad divisions will be interspersed with software teams on the middle levels.

No, Apple didn't forget the iPhone team.

Ive takes offense at the idea that he hasn't already thought of every detail during the years of planning Apple Park. He scoffs at an article claiming that Apple contributed to a tree shortage in the Bay Area by buying up so many plants for the campus, "as if we'd got to the end of our project and we thought, Oh, we'd better plant some trees." Apple began working with an arborist years ago to source trees, including varieties that once made up the bountiful orchards of Silicon Valley; more than 9,000, many of them drought-resistant, will have been planted by the time the campus is finished.

That lack of last minute decision making can probably be applied to far more Apple products than rumors would have us believe.

With each new product Apple rolls out, its predecessors seem a little antiquated. But Ive and Jobs built Apple Park to last, and their legacy will be etched into the glass, concrete and trees for decades to come. Just as the ring blurs the boundary between inside and outside, Ive's personal and professional lives are fluid. As a designer, "you spend so much time living in or living with the solution that doesn't yet exist," he says. "I'm just looking forward to going to see an engineer I'm working with on something, to sit there and perhaps walk out and sit outside for a bit with him, to be able to go to the workshop and start to see how we're building something."

Gorgeous work by the Wall Street Journal. Read the words, delight at the images.

I can't wait for it to ship.