Interesting how cherry picking quotes can push whatever narrative you want. In a different article, it said “while there are advantages to the temporary system, a physical presence at the office is irreplaceable, Cook said.” https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/09/22/apple-ceo-tim-coo...
Money aside, that building is a marketing vehicle. It's meant to show Apple in the posh, advanced, and sustainable light it wants to be seen (whether that image is true or not is another question, but such is marketing).
It was also built to draw in new talent, but in a pandemic it's probably not the attractor they hoped it would be. I doubt Cook is losing sleep over it, but the pandemic definitely messed with his long term plans (like most everyone else, of course).
I thought the building was a marketing stunt. Apple has 137k employees and the campus seems to have a 2k employee capacity.
Some funny bits from Wikipedia
> The use of special wood as a construction material was reported to be the subject of a 30-page guideline.
> The design of door handles was reported to be the subject of a one and a half year debate, involving several revisions before the Apple management gave its approval.
Thank you for sharing this. The Bloomberg quote seems to be literally the opposite of what he said. Looks like media has decide "we are going remote" headline gets the clicks
Perhaps you couldn't read the article because of the paywall, but it does include the following:
> Cook said 10% to 15% of Apple employees have gone back to the office and he hopes the majority of staff can return to the company’s new campus in Silicon Valley sometime next year.
The CEO said he goes into the office at different points during the week and he noted that remote work is “not like being together physically.” Working in the office sparks creativity such as during impromptu meetings, he added.
Overall it's a balanced article that shows Cook both acknowledging WFH benefits and reiterating the perceived advantages of the office.
No it's not the opposite. Tim Cook made two statements to bulid a slightly nuanced thesis, and both articles presented the nuance, and some commenters are inventing a one-sided straw argument to attack.
No they didn't, and that's the problem. It's not a "straw argument".
Cook, in an interview, said something that included both a pro-remote statement and a pro-office statement. The AppleInsider article included both of these statements. Bloomberg, OTOH, only included the pro-remote statement in their article.
Exactly this! Journalist should report "from all perspectives". But today rarely we see this - just look CNN and Fox News - only a single perspective is reported on both sides! "It's lying by omission."
Or, both thing can be true. He can believe a physical office is necessary, while also believing changes should be made to make it easier for people to sometimes work from home.
Beside the point of media narratives, I think it tends to depend on the type of work being done. IMO, it's a lot easier to effectively collaborate remotely on most types of software, particularly cloud/web software. It's much tougher to imagine it working out well for troubleshooting electrical or mechanical issues in hardware prototypes.
There's too many tests that can only be done hands-on and require expensive and delicate instruments. Too many issues that can come up with engineers using different physical prototype hardware and different instruments, misunderstanding communication about what is being measured where, misinterpreting results. And too much time overhead in shipping things around the country constantly.
This is a necessary consequence of compressing any non-trivial idea into a single headline, and if you assume without evidence that the only two possible narratives are "no remote" and "all remote".
Both articles, despite your insinutation of different narratives, contain the same quote "I don't believe that we'll return to the way we were, because we found that there are some things that actually work really well virtually,"
>Both articles, despite your insinutation of different narratives, contain the same quote "I don't believe that we'll return to the way we were, because we found that there are some things that actually work really well virtually,"
The actual quote is:
>"In all candor, it's not like being together physically, and so I can't wait for everybody to be able to come back into the office. I don't believe that we'll return to the way we were, because we found that there are some things that actually work really well virtually," Cook said. "But things like creativity and the serendipity that you talk about, these things, you depend on people kind of running into each other over the course of a day. We have designed our entire office such that there are common areas where people congregate and talk about different things, and you can't schedule those things."
And both articles do not contain this same quote. The Bloomberg article only contains a fragment of that quote, which seems to be specifically cherry picked to further a narrative.
Being on the ground at the fruit company, this quote is representative of reality there. Remote is a dud for well over half of employees. If remote work was ever going to be a smash, it was going to be with everyone doing it simultaneously. Remote work will be chilled after this I think.
Yeah "Apple CEO undecided on remote" is a boring headline, but it would be news. To alter it to one extreme or the other is what we call "fake news", in other words, lies to get you to click.
Cook's quotes for multiple viewpoints enable each media conglomerate to have writers champion their leadership's talking points for this moment in time.
Meanwhile, Apple has one of the world's best 3D office spaces for experiencing and designing the future of augmented-reality workspaces. Would Apple spend years of R&D on ultra-precise location sensing (Ultra Wideband, WiFi6) and 3D-imaging (Lidar, FaceID) to surrender the future of digital workspaces to VR and Zoom?