After Steve by Tripp Mickle

Author:Tripp Mickle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Accountants

Unbound, Jony Ive took flight. His Gulfstream GV fueled up in San Jose and took off for Hawaii in May, France in June, and the Virgin Islands by year-end. They were part of a rotation of exclusive destinations that Ive reached from a cabin of luxury.

From the tarmac, he would ascend a few steps into a compartment whose curving white walls framed rows of plush leather seats the creamy color of a caffe latte. The tasteful interior had been custom designed by Jobs, one of the few people with a sense of style as refined as his own.

Ive had bought the jet from Steve Jobs’s family after his late boss died. The family had been using it since around 2000, when Apple’s board had given Jobs the private plane as a thank-you gift for rescuing the company from bankruptcy. Jobs had spent more than a year customizing its interior, insisting on small details such as having the cabin’s polished metal buttons be replaced with ones made of brushed metal. For Ive, who had consulted on the jet’s interior design, the exacting touches were reminders of a man whose high standards had changed the world.

After the Apple Watch launch, Ive wanted to escape from the exhaustion of Cupertino. His part-time agreement allowed him to heal through travel while his lieutenants shouldered the management of the hundreds of people working on Apple’s industrial and software designs. Ive stayed updated on the work being done but mostly skipped the studio’s weekly meetings that had defined two decades of his life. While his industrial designers and software designers debated the curves and colors of future products, he recuperated at his Kauai estate and spent time alongside the electric blue water of the French Riviera.

When he returned to San Francisco, he monitored an ongoing renovation of his Pacific Heights mansion. The team at Foster + Partners, the architects of Apple’s new campus, had drawn up plans to turn the $17 million, four-bedroom, seven-bath home into a more customized space for him, Heather, and their two boys. As construction progressed, he sometimes spent time at the Battery, an exclusive social club in downtown San Francisco where Silicon Valley’s elite gathered. Rather than meeting in the design studio where he once showed Jobs iPhone prototypes, he would summon designers to the venue forty-seven miles from Cupertino for occasional meetings so he could stay abreast of Apple’s continuing projects.

He toggled between being engaged and disengaged, present and absent, in charge but not fully responsible. His time once again became his own.

AS IVE BEGAN TO DETACH, work on the Titan car project accelerated. The company hired hundreds of engineers and academics with expertise in batteries and cameras, machine learning and mathematics. They were lured with promises of developing the company’s next great product, one that would speed past Detroit and remake the world.

The new hires found themselves working in nondescript warehouses in Sunnyvale, California, a new outpost shrouded in absolute secrecy. They labored on the most complex project Apple had ever undertaken, an endeavor considered to be as complex as NASA’s journey to the moon.

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