Steve Jobs

morning. “We put iTunes on Windows in order to sell more iPods. But I don’t see an advantage of putting our music app on Android, except to make Android users happy. And I don’t want to make Android users happy.”
    A New Campus
    When Jobs was thirteen, he had looked up Bill Hewlett in the phone book, called him to score a part he needed for a frequency counter he was trying to build, and ended up getting a summer job at the instruments division of Hewlett-Packard. That same year HP bought some land in Cupertino to expand its calculator division. Wozniak went to work there, and it was on this site that he designed the Apple I and Apple II during his moonlighting hours.
    When HP decided in 2010 to abandon its Cupertino campus, which was just about a mile east of Apple’s One Infinite Loop headquarters, Jobs quietly arranged to buy it and the adjoining property. He admired the way that Hewlett and Packard had built a lasting company, andhe prided himself on having done the same at Apple. Now he wanted a showcase headquarters, something that no West Coast technology company had. He eventually accumulated 150 acres, much of which had been apricot orchards when he was a boy, and threw himself into what would become a legacy project that combined his passion for design with his passion for creating an enduring company. “I want to leave a signature campus that expresses the values of the company for generations,” he said.
    He hired what he considered to be the best architectural firm in the world, that of Sir Norman Foster, which had done smartly engineered buildings such as the restored Reichstag in Berlin and 30 St. Mary Axe in London. Not surprisingly, Jobs got so involved in the planning, both the vision and the details, that it became almost impossible to settle on a final design. This was to be his lasting edifice, and he wanted to get it right. Foster’s firm assigned fifty architects to the team, and every three weeks throughout 2010 they showed Jobs revised models and options. Over and over he would come up with new concepts, sometimes entirely new shapes, and make them restart and provide more alternatives.
    When he first showed me the models and plans in his living room, the building was shaped like a huge winding racetrack made of three joined semicircles around a large central courtyard. The walls were floor-to-ceiling glass, and the interior had rows of office pods that allowed the sunlight to stream down the aisles. “It permits serendipitous and fluid meeting spaces,” he said, “and everybody gets to participate in the sunlight.”
    The next time he showed me the plans, a month later, we were in Apple’s large conference room across from his office, where a model of the proposed building covered the table. He had made a major change. The pods would all be set back from the windows so that long corridors would be bathed in sun. These would also serve as the common spaces. There was a debate with some of the architects, who wanted to allow the windows to be opened. Jobs had never liked the idea of people being able to open things. “That would just allow people to screw things up,” he declared. On that, as on other details, he prevailed.
    When he got home that evening, Jobs showed off the drawings at dinner, and Reed joked that the aerial view reminded him of male genitalia. His father dismissed the comment as reflecting the mind-set of a teenager. But the next day he mentioned the comment to the architects. “Unfortunately, once I’ve told you that, you’re never going to be able to erase that image from your mind,” he said. By the next time I visited, the shape had been changed to a simple circle.
    The new design meant that there would not be a straight piece of glass in the building. All would be curved and seamlessly joined. Jobs had long been fascinated with glass, and his experience demanding huge custom panes for Apple’s retail stores made him confident that it would be possible to make massive curved pieces in quantity. The planned center courtyard was eight hundred feet across (more than three typical city blocks, or almost the length of three football fields), and he showed it to me with overlays indicating how it could surround St. Peter’s Square in Rome. One of his lingering memories was of the orchards that had once dominated the area, so he hired a senior arborist from Stanford and decreed that 80% of the property would be landscaped in a natural manner, with six