Inside Apple

Led by Evans Hankey and Alan Dye, the Apple Design Team holds enormous sway over our evolving relationship with technology. Opening the doors to their Cupertino studio for the first time, they offered us an exclusive look at the working processes behind their latest creations

- By Jonathan Bell. Photographs by Jason Schmidt

In the distance is a rectangular frame of foliage. In the foreground, a conference table, placed with architectural rigour so that the focal point is dead centre of the screen. The scene is a tiny cross section through Apple Park, the tech giant’s mighty circular HQ in Cupertino, by Foster + Partners (see W*225). There are 12,000 employees on site here, including the Apple Design Team. This agile but hugely significant department thinks in terms of scope, not scale.

Working side by side to guide this division are Evans Hankey, Apple’s VP of industrial design, and Alan Dye, VP of human interface design. Both close colleagues, confidants and friends of Jony Ive, they effectively took the helm of the Design Team after his departure from the chief design officer role in 2019. Today they’re both here to talk Wallpaper* through the past few years at Apple, a time of consistent growth, both in terms of products shipped and revenue earned. Apple is a behemoth in every sense of the word, generating $366bn in revenue in 2020, over half of which came from the iPhone, the world’s best-selling handset every year since 2016 (it’s estimated that over a billion iPhones have been sold to date). From television to headphones to watches, growth was experienced right across the company.