Price no object at Apple HQ

Do you remember the NEXT computer, the one Steve Jobs began building in 1985 after he was booted from Apple by then-chief executive John Sculley and the board?

It was supposed to be a machine built for academia, the ultimate learning tool priced so that universities could buy them in bulk. But, Jobs being Jobs, he had particular ideas about what it should look like and how it should be made.

It had to be a perfect cube, which created manufacturing complications. The screws inside the computer required expensive plating.

His engineers designed custom chips instead of using off-the-shelf semiconductors. He built a futuristic factory to manufacture the computer, which included, as Walter Isaacson recounts in his biography of Jobs, ‘‘$20,000 black leather chairs and a custom-made staircase, just as in the corporate headquarters.’’

The result was exactly what you’d expect: a beautiful machine that universities couldn’t possibly afford. I thought of the NEXT computer when I read that Apple’s new headquarters building in Cupertino, California - its official name is Apple Park; unofficially it’s ‘‘the spaceship’’ - cost an astonishing US$5 billion (NZ$6.9B).

That makes it the world’s third most expensive modern building at the time of completion (after the Abraj Al Bait, a skyscraper hotel complex in Mecca, and the Marina Bay Sands, a casino and entertainment centre in Singapore).

A Google search unearthed the news that when the complex was originally designed in 2011, it was supposed to cost a little under US$3B. That would have made it more expensive than the headquarters of Goldman Sachs, which was built in 2009 for US$2.1B, but less than the rebuilt World Trade Centre, at US$3.9B.

And while Apple was said to be looking for ways to cut costs before construction began, that clearly didn’t happen. Why? For the same reason that the NEXT computer cost US$6500: because Jobs, whose design ideas were central to Apple Park, insisted on aesthetic touches that would make the building a) unique and beautiful and b) more costly.

In mid-may, Steven Levy of Wired got an early look at Apple Park and noted some of these Jobsian touches.

‘‘The stone for the exterior of the Fitness and Wellness centre was sourced from a quarry in Kansas, and then distressed, like a pair of jeans, to make it look like the stone at Jobs’s favourite hotel in Yosemite,’’ one caption noted.

The staircases are ‘‘a lightweight concrete that achieves the perfect white, and they have unusual banisters that seem carved from the wall alongside the stairs,’’ Levy reported.

The sliding glass doors for the cafe are 25m by 16m. And so on.

Could Apple afford a US$5B headquarters? Of course. As of early May, the company had more than US$250B in cash on hand. And although it’s certainly true that building an extravagant headquarters can sometimes mark the moment that a company peaks, in a pride-cometh-before-the-fall kind of way, I hesitate to suggest such a fate for Apple.

I thought Jobs’s death would mark Apple’s top, and the company has added, oh, only about US$400B in market cap since then.

What Apple Park suggests, though, is that the company hasn’t yet moved beyond its founder. That has both an upside and a downside.

‘‘Could we have cut corners here and there?’’ Cook said to Levy. ‘‘It wouldn’t have been Apple. And it wouldn’t have sent the message to everybody working here that detail matters, that care matters.’’

But it also sends a message that money is no object, that every design whim can be indulged, even if it drives the cost up, and that the Steve Jobs way remains the only way. – Washington Post