A History of Infinite Loop Told in Anecdotes ⇥ wired.com

With the move of Apple’s headquarters from the Infinite Loop campus to Apple Park, Steven Levy interviewed several current and former Apple employees — including high-ranking individuals like Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, Eddy Cue, and Scott Forstall — about their memories of Infinite Loop. This one’s pretty good:

[Tony Fadell]: When I arrived in 2001 [to lead the iPod project], it still felt like a campus that wasn’t filled. There were all these empty offices everywhere in every building. All of the furnishings and everything had not been updated since it opened.

Cook: It was an awful time. The stock crashed, it goes down by 60 to 70 percent. We get a call from Ted Waitt, founder of Gateway. He wants to talk about acquiring Apple. Steve and I went to a meeting with Waitt and their CEO, and it’s a different Steve. Very calm, listening to the comments they made, how they’d probably keep the Apple brand. I was sitting there feeling like my organs were being cut out. Then they said maybe they could come up with a role for Steve, and I’m thinking—he’s going to blow! He’s going to blow any minute! Then they start talking about price. And Steve looks at them—he could look at you with eyes that just penetrated your soul—and says, “Who do you think is worth more, Apple or Gateway?” The meeting lasted only two or three minutes more. And in a few weeks they had some accounting scandal, and their stock crashed.

It’s odd to reflect that many of the products that have defined Apple’s renaissance and Steve Jobs’ legacy were created at a campus that he had no part in designing and, according to this profile, he disliked. Now, Apple is based out of a campus that was his dream; yet, he’s not around to take advantage of it, or be a physical part of this chapter in the company’s legacy.