"Over the past four years, [Jony Ive] has quietly accumulated nearly $90 million worth of real estate on a single city block. The purchases began early in the pandemic, at a time when many tech luminaries were fleeing San Francisco. Mr. Ive found the exodus noxious.... A self-professed control freak, Mr. Ive decided that he had fretted enough over the snugness of each iPhone box, the layout of every Apple Watch component and the curve of every iPad corner. He wanted something new.... [H]e and his future wife, Heather, fell in love with Jackson Square. Many buildings in the neighborhood had survived the city’s 1906 earthquake and fire because there was a whiskey storehouse in the area. City officials had worried the alcohol would catch on fire, so they protected the neighborhood, even as the rest of the city burned.... At Apple, he had worked at Infinite Loop, a sterile office park near the interstate, and Apple Park, a futuristic circle of glass and blonde wood. Both campuses were so isolated that they could have existed anywhere. He wanted his new office to be part of the community."
From "After Apple, Jony Ive Is Building an Empire of His Own/Five years after leaving Apple, the iPhone designer is forging a new life in San Francisco, one imaginative building at a time" (NYT)(free-access link).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
16 comments:
And if it were Musk doing this, he'd be roasted for being a rich, fat cat who's causing gentrification.
My daughter, Claire was interviewed for a job with Apple a few years ago by the head of design. I wonder if this is the guy? She went through a half-dozen interviews and this guy was last. She didn't get the job and was relieved after considering where to live.
from the article: "He wanted his new office to be part of the community".
---
Readers may find a visual look at Apple Park worthwhile.
"Organizing people to work together effectively is surely one of the great challenges (and opportunities) over the next few decades. In person, remote, "hybrid", contractors, teams, "ai"/bots and so on. The choices are endless and no small hurdle."
https://amuznews.blogspot.com/2024/09/thinking-about-work-and-place.html
Yes yes. Why does he het a pass?
It seems a dumb as a stump kind of investment but time will tell. Clearly economics is not the highest priority. Bezos did this kind of stuff in Seattle several years ahead of him. What lovely shiny turds Bezos polished…
Interesting and talented guy. I have to admit that I was a bit surprised to learn that he is married to a woman.
Five years designing a type face sounds like a take off on Knuth, who famously wrote Tex and designed fonts in order to typeset his books (TAOCP).
Interesting timing for a coastal elite flex story.
Next the guy will look into buying Hetch Hetchy.
This is one of the benefits of income inequality, you get insanely wealthy people willing to spend extravagantly on architecture. Sometimes you get something interesting.
Thanks for the link. I really liked the ad for Van Cleef and Arpels’ Alhambra collection. After I read the name of the collection I saw the Islamic influence on the design. It’s a beautiful collection. I wonder what Ive would think of the design.
"He wanted his new office to be part of the community."
And thus it incorporates an all-weather 24/7 opioid market with plenty of defecation alcoves and pass-out pavement.
"The chairs were topped by papers and cardboard boxes with the earliest ideas for a product that uses A.I. to create a computing experience that is less socially disruptive than the iPhone.
The project is being developed in secret. Mr. Newson said that what the product would be and when it would be released were still being determined."
Secret no more; whatever it is.
Maybe this rich liberal guy will be interested in cleaning up downtown S.F. now.
It is visionary only if there are renters. Otherwise it is a white elephant.
If you take NOTHING away from this story about one of America's most insane moments ... the burning of an entire city after one of the most insane Earthquakes ever recorded ... you MUST take this away so that you understand what America's political class considers important in such an event:
"City officials (politicians) had worried the alcohol would catch on fire, so they protected the neighborhood, even as the rest of the city burned."
Whiskey.
That was more important ... by far ... than any other human possession or body.
For GOD'S VERY SAKE ... do not let the whiskey burn.
Remember that the next time some politician tells you they have a plan for your future. The plan is to let you burn to death while they protect their booze.
Actually, I had a patient who was there that day. Quite a story. He and a couple of friends watched the whole city burn. Was stuck there almost a month before they could get out. Water was barged to the city.
Jony Ive was essential to the turnaround at Apple, but his obsession with style unchecked by the practical side started to become a problem. I think the two best days for Apple were the day Jony Ive joined the company, and the day he left.
He was ignoring Steve Jobs' dictum "design is not how it looks, but how it works" with his obsession with making devices thin -- too thin often to be used comfortably. It's not a surprise that my iPhone 13 is a copy of my iPhone 5, and doesn't need a case to be held comfortably like my iPhone 6 did. He passed his 'sell by' date at Apple.
To call apple stagnant is to ignore the push into health that Tim Cook has championed. Cook's push to make the watch more than just the fashion accessory that Ive envisioned has allowed it to be more than a passing trend. It ignores the huge success of the AirPods. And it completely ignores the implications of Apple silicon. Overnight, Apple threw Intel back on its heels with the M1 processor. And yes, while the services aren't as sexy as a new iPhone, they've allowed Apple to grow. That's the point of a corporation; to make money and grow.
Jony Ive did incredible work at Apple. He is one of the great designers of the 20th - 21st century. But it was time for him to move on.
Post a Comment