One Ring to rule us all

Tonight, all eyes are on Cupertino for the feverishly anticipated iPhone launch — but the real star

AS YOU read this, the eyes of t h e wo rl d are turning towards Cupertino, the Californian city in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains that is home to Apple. Because today it’s announcing, at 6pm London time, the company’s latest product releases. Many are focusing on what the 10th-anniversary iPhone will look like, as the press gather for the inaugural event at the Steve Jobs Theater. But here’s the real story: from the theatre, those with a prized invitation will be able to get the world’s first proper glimpse of Apple Park.

No, it’s not a theme park, it’s the new company campus, which has cost $5 billion to build and which includes The Ring, a massive, doughnut-shaped building with a lush park at its centre. And which unkind critics have said is typical Apple because it’s looking inwards (although what spoils this quip is that there are huge windows on the outer ring of the circle, very much looking out to the world). Wags have also said there’s another Apple trademark evident in the building — it has a walled garden, just like the company’s software.

Apple Park has been a long time coming. On June 6, 2011, then-CEO Steve Jobs had hosted the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, announcing the launch of its iCloud service. He, as ever, was passionate and professional. But he looked frail — as everybody knew, he was in exceptionally poor health. So it was a surprise when, the following day, he appeared in front of a meeting of the Cupertino City Council to present proposals for a new Apple headquarters.

Jobs explained that “Apple has grown like a weed” and that the company had bought a parcel of land that was special to him. When he was 13, Bill Hewlett of computer giant Hewlett Packard had given him a summer job. At around the same time, HP had bought this land for one of its divisions. Then, decades later, when it decided to sell the now builtup plot, Apple snapped it up. “It all used to be apricot orchards and we’d like to put a new campus on that so we can stay in Cupertino. We’ve come up with a design that can put 12,000 people in one building,” Jobs declared, saying the building looked a little like a spaceship had just landed. The council meeting was his last public appearance. He died four months later.

The centrepiece of the campus he had dreamed of is a vast, circular, spaceship-like building. It has a perimeter of more than three-quarters of a mile. “There’s not a straight piece of glass in the building, it’s all curved,” Jobs had told the council. Indeed, some of these pieces of glass stretch the full four-floor height of the building (13.8m or 45ft). These are the doors to the café, and while each weighs 440,000lbs or 200 tonnes, they open silently thanks to hi-tech motorisation.

Jobs had from the start promised to change the dynamic of the site, which was mostly asphalt car parks and with just 20 per cent landscaping. Under Jobs’ vision, 80 per cent would become green spaces and this would be achieved by burying some of the car parks underground. And, of course, planting thousands of trees — many of them apricots.

The campus has been designed by British architects Foster+Partners and at the peak of the projec t around 250 of its staff were working on it. There were also 6,200 construction workers on the site. Foster+Partners is responsible for the recently updated look of several Apple Stores, including the recently revamped Regent Street outlet and the sleek, tactile, elegant style of that space will be reflected in Apple Park.

What might seem surprising for famously secretive Apple (a company where staff need to be careful to keep projects on lockdown) is that it has designed a building that encourages collaboration — that café with the four-storey glass doors is the only one in the building, apparently, so everybody has to bump into each other at some point.

Apple staff, who are moving in to the campus in waves, will sit collectively at large tables. There have been rumours that some people have pushed back against this, with teams objecting to this sea change — American offices have been slow to embrace the openplan office so familiar in the London workplace, sticking with the cubicles where you can drink your soy latte in solitude. Landline desk phones will be rare — everyone is expected to communicate by smartphone. So it will be handy if, as anticipated, the new iPhones have wireless charging — and expect those desks to feature wireless charging pads, designed by Apple, naturally.

Of course, some areas of the building will not be open to all. The teams that design new products under Sir Jonathan Ive, Apple’s British head of design, known to everyone as Jony, will have translucent glass around their section so that peeping eyes won’t see the secrets within.

Ive’s team will be one of the last to move in but his famously fastidious attention to detail in evidence everywhere. Such as customdesigned switches on the underside of desks so that they can be height-adjusted seamlessly. The switches have two buttons so you don’t even have to lean down and see them, one is convex, one concave. And door handles were another pored-over detail that went through extensive prototyping. The result is a handle that’s milled from a single piece of aluminium and is held in place with no visible screws.

While the temperature is controlled by piping in the floors and ceilings, to

There are no desk phones, and the only translucent glass will be around the secretive design team