Apple's New Apple Park—Yet Another Beautiful Mistake

Recently I was on a conference call with an Apple employee discussing some aspects of an app we're submitting. At the beginning of our call, she let us know she would have to end the call about 10 minutes early, as she needed the extra time to get to her next meeting. You see, apparently it is very time-consuming to get around the new "Apple Park" campus, and she'd need that additional window simply to be on-time to her next call.

The comment stuck with me.

In a way, it is a perfect little encapsulation of everything that has been wrong with Apple since Jobs' untimely passing. For whatever reason, the post-Jobs Apple is incapable of producing "perfection." At least, incapable of producing what we, at the time, considered perfection. Instead, Apple now is California's chief producer of beautiful mistakes.

In the era of Jobs, especially towards the latter years of his life, Apple was known for its remarkable attention to detail. We've all heard stories of Jobs tossing an iPod prototype into a fish tank to prove there was still room to shrink the device (evidenced by bubbles rising from the iPod, which could only come from space left for air). And then there are the stories about Jobs' insistence that a Macbook have symmetrically-matching screw placement on both sides of the device, despite the structure of the Macbook only requiring screws on one side. Basically, he was seemingly obsessed with the tiniest details that few would notice, but would make the products that much better.

But then Jobs died. And it didn't take long for things to become just slightly less perfect.

Look at recent products: the rechargeable Magic Mouse, for example, which requires a presumably busy person plug it in via a port on the bottom...meaning it can't be used while charging. Or take the Apple Pencil, which charges by plugging it into the Lightning port on an Apple device (most typically the iPad Pro), in a precarious and easily-snappable position (and part of me really wants to snap that Pencil in half when I'm charging it).

Or take the most recent example: the iPhone X, with its gross notch. Sure, Apple did a great job of rounding the edges of the notch, but it's like putting lipstick on a pig. The notch is still a notch, after all.

It's these little mistakes on otherwise beautiful, thoughtful products that seem to be Apple's new modus operandi.

Was Jobs the key to Apple's design success during his lifetime? It's unlikely it was Jobs alone that was "the key," but he certainly wielded some sort of inexplicable influence over the way design was implemented from within. Was design better because Jobs rejected anything less than perfection? Or did he resonate an aura throughout Apple that simply altered how people approached their work? Truthfully, I cannot say, but one thing I believe we can all agree on is that thoughtfulness in Apple's industrial design has taken a backseat to polish and presentation. Their focus on function is secondary to their focus on facade.

Apple Park is simply the natural evolution of this mindset, in which Apple constructed an incredible monument to itself, full of crystal-clear glass dividers (that employees repeatedly run into) and 175 acres of nature (that requires employees ride bikes to traverse), and ultimately damaged what the workplace is supposed to optimize: productivity.

It is, perhaps, their most beautiful mistake to date.