Jason Snell, writing at Macworld, bouncing off of Steven Levy’s recent feature about Apple’s new campus:
As detailed by Levy, Apple Park is an Apple product through and through. The company took great care to make design decisions, and create custom hardware, at many key points—from the massive glass sheets that required the building of a gigantic furnace, to the toilets, to the handles on the doors, to the pizza boxes in the cafeteria. It’s a one-off product designed by Apple for itself, yes, but it seems to have received the same attention to detail as any other major product launch.
Snell continues:
(In fact, reading Levy’s story, I wondered to myself if some of Apple’s product sluggishness over the last couple of years might be somehow related to the design energy going into the new campus. Probably not, but you never know. I’m more concerned about the hit in productivity the company may experience when it has to move so many of its employees to new workspaces and allow them some time to adapt to their surroundings.)
In looking back over the last 18 or more months, it’s not hard to think Apple has been disctracted by something. I don’t think Apple Park is all of it, but I think it may be part of a puzzle we’ll never see.
Whatever the case may be there — and we could be reading Apple all wrong here — there’s no doubt this new campus has Jobs’ fingerprints all over it.