“Toward the end of a talk late last month at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, Apple’s chief design officer, Jonathan Ive, vented for a moment about the backlash against Apple Park, the company’s 2.8-million-square-foot circular headquarters building that has drawn some scorn for a perfectionist construction process that reportedly pushed its cost to $5 billion,” Rob Pegoraro reports for The Washington Post. “The audience laughed at Ive’s defense of what he called ‘a lovely environment’ that will help Apple employees work better together.”
“But the people paying for Apple products could be forgiven if their only laughter was of the bitter variety. Because while the company should have sufficient resources to obsess over both its headquarters and its software and hardware — even factoring in greater pressure to ship a new operating system or smartphone on time — the reality seen by Apple customers suggests otherwis,” Pegoraro reports. “These aren’t edge-case software breakdowns or random manufacturing glitches. They’re the kind of reproducible flaws that companies are supposed to find and fix before shipping a product.”
“The most valuable publicly traded company in America, with a market capitalization nearing $1 trillion, has also found itself incapable of keeping its computer lineup current,” Pegoraro reports. “The attention lavished on Apple Park, meanwhile, shows far more rigorous attention to detail. A February report by Julia Love of Reuters recounted such pursuits of perfection as 30 or so pages of documentation for woodwork, Apple’s insistence that doorways be perfectly flat so that engineers need not adjust their gait to avoid a threshold, and “a year and a half of debate” over a door handle’s contours.”
“A personnel move revealed Friday suggested one high-ranking Apple executive had been distracted by Apple Park’s construction: Ive, who Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and Alex Webb reported had returned to directly managing Apple’s design efforts after two year,” Pegoraro reports. “But if the company wanted to craft a target for resentment among its loyal customers, it could not have done much better than to put this circle of glass and metal on the map.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Great job, Apple.
Don’t worry, very few people read The Washington Post or any of the hundreds of other outlets to which this article is and will be syndicated. (read with dripping sarcasm)
Apple brass. Lost for years in the weeds of Apple Park, The Colossal Distraction. May you find your way out ASAP!
[Organizations like Apple] require a charismatic leader who will shoot people in the knees when needed. – Alan Kay, April 2013
SEE ALSO:
Apple Park estimated to cost upwards of $5 billion to build – December 9, 2017
Apple started working on HomePod in 2012, so why are they so late to the smart speaker market? – November 21, 2017
Why Apple’s HomePod is three years behind Amazon’s Echo – November 21, 2017
Under ‘operations genius’ Tim Cook, product delays and other problems are no longer unusual for Apple – November 20, 2017
Apple delays HomePod release to early 2018 – November 17, 2017
Apple CEO Tim Cook: The ‘operations genius’ who never has enough products to sell at launch – October 23, 2017
Apple’s Mac Pro debacle: Failure and future – May 8, 2017
Why is Apple’s next-gen Mac Pro taking so long? – April 18, 2017
Apple’s desperate Mac Pro damage control message hints at a confused, divided company – April 6, 2017
Who has taken over at Apple? – April 5, 2017
Apple’s embarrassing Mac Pro mea culpa – April 4, 2017
Who’s going to buy a Mac Pro now? – April 4, 2017
Mac Pro: Why did it take Apple so long to wake up? – April 4, 2017
Apple sorry for what happened with the Mac Pro over the last 3+ years – namely, nothing – April 4, 2017
AirPods: MIA for the holidays; delayed product damages Apple’s credibility, stokes customer frustration – December 9, 2016
Lazy Apple. It’s not hard to imagine Steve Jobs asking, ‘What have you been doing for the last four years?’ – December 9, 2016
