theceomagazine.com | 83The ‘think different’ philosophy of
Steve Jobs extended way beyond
his visionary product designs to
Apple’s shiny new Silicon Valley
headquarters – Apple Park, aka
The Spaceship.WORDS • STEPHEN CORBYI
t is surely no accident that the final plans for
Apple’s vast and gobsmackingly gorgeous new
headquarters crystallised in the final stages of
Steve Jobs’s extraordinary life.
Here was a man who had devoted most of his life
to building revolutionary yet ultimately disposable
products, pouring the very last of his energy into
a concrete-and-glass legacy he hoped would long
outlast Apple’s other products.
Critically, he wanted his company’s new
headquarters to be something he had never previously
achieved with any of his storied product launches,
no matter how successful they’d been. He wanted
it to be futureproof.THIS LAND IS MY LAND
While Apple had been quietly snapping up land in
Cupertino, California, for a number of years, the full
extent of the plans for this vast mega-facility weren’t
known until June 2011, when a visibly unwell Jobs –
with his trademark attire of black turtle neck and blue
jeans hanging off a stick-thin frame that had been
shrunk by illness – addressed a Cupertino Council
meeting, lobbying in person for the approval needed
for construction to begin.
“This land is kind of special to me,” he told them,
explaining how the land purchased for the sale had
been owned by Hewlett Packard, the computing firm
that had given a 13-year-old Jobs his first summer job,
building frequency counters.
“We’ve seen these office parks with lots of buildings
and they get pretty boring, pretty fast. We’d like to do
something better than that,” he told the council, as an
image of an enormous and circular building flashed
onto the screen.
“What we’d like to build there is one building that
holds 12,000 people. And it’s a pretty amazing
building. It’s kind of like a spaceship landed.” »Tech HQ | INNOVATE