One wrinkle here is that Jobs himself was by all accounts the person most responsible for Apple opening a Cork facility in 1980, and for whatever Apple and the

One wrinkle here is that Jobs himself was by all accounts the person most responsible for Apple opening a Cork facility in 1980, and for whatever Apple and the Irish government promised each other as part of that deal. There's some indication that Irish governments were unhappy with what they got from it https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/state-papers-macsharry-objected-to-additional-support-for-apple-in-cork-1.3735662 https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/state-papers-... but it's hard to be sure exactly what happened there: Apple was probably not in the best shape to carry out ambitious relocation plans for much of the '80s, for one thing. While I don't have boundless love for either Jobs or RTO mandates, and as an Irishman I would very much rather not see Cork getting the dirty end of the stick, I have to defend Jobs' desire for centralisation a bit here. There's considerable evidence that having nearly all the central product and design people within easy reach of SJ stalking around 1 Infinite Loop did in fact work very well for Apple in the second Jobs era. Maybe it was still a wrong decision, despite appearances, but you can hardly say that it was an eccentric one. (And in 2000 the tools for offsite or multi-site collaboration weren't even as not-entirely-great as they are now.) It was other people who brought in the madcap element of trying to hide things from the boss, not Jobs himself.