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Tim Cook has done some things right. But can anyone really argue that the company has indeed changed, even subtly, under his watch? The pandering to the emerging markets. Long wait times between product updates. Incremental advancements to the extreme. Marketing "culture," "style," "beauty," over the specs of the devices. Meetings with Carl Icahn, providing dividends and stock buy backs, hyper sensitivity to the whims of the markets. All dramatic changes since Jobs passed. It's not arguable, those changes at least.

Pandering to emerging markets makes perfect commercial sense - it presents opportunity to grow. If Apple had chosen to focus on existing markets only, which would soon be come saturated, then I would be concerned for the future of the company.

The marketing style has changed, but the underlining approach hasn't. Apple has never sold a product based on technical specs, it's always been an emotive driven approach which fits perfectly with their long time ethos of making products that better lives.
 



One month after the latest video update on Apple's second campus, today a new drone video was posted online with a couple minutes worth of footage showing new headway made on the project. In the video (which was shot using a DJI Inspire 1 Pro drone), solar panels on the roof of the campus are nearing completion as the main building continues to take the shape of Steve Jobs' vision.

The outside of the building has seen a lot of development, with the glass facade nearly finished both on the inside and outside of the circular structure. Construction is also continuing apace on the nearby auxiliary buildings, including one for R&D, two finished garages that will hold 8,000 cars, and the campus' underground auditorium.


As the project nears the end of construction, landscaping is getting a heavier focus as well. Most notably, a large pond with a surrounding garden at the center of the campus has begun taking shape, with more detailed outlines and giant boulders put in place within the future pond area.

Spread across the entire campus, including the new garden, Apple plans to have more than 7,000 trees on the site consisting of 300 different species, including fruit trees. Employee amenities will include various exercise-focused zones like joggling and cycling trails, and courts for basketball and tennis.

The project is expected to be completed by the end of 2016, with employees moving in towards the beginning of 2017.

Article Link: Apple Campus 2 Drone Video Shows Nearly Complete Main Building and Landscape Updates
[doublepost=1472892843][/doublepost]Reminds me of a giant ring piece.
 
What a waste of money, imho.

They currently lease 30 random buildings all over town.
I like the idea of it but in day to day life it seems impractical, I imagine it like this:
Damn I need a HDMI cable from IT..., a half hour to get on the other side of the building...,nah dont need the cable anymore...

Currently they are spread out all over town in 30 leased buildings.
 
This is where it's useful to understand the difference between a ring and a circular plan. To cut across the diameter of a ring plan building requires exiting and re-entering the building. A person on the 4th floor of the building wishing to meet with a person on the 4th floor on the opposite side of the ring would be forced to take an elevator to the ground floor, leave the building (assuming it isn't raining), cut across the diameter of the building, re-enter as close as possible to their destination, and take another elevator back to the 4th floor. Or walk the half the circumference of the building. The ring is a pretty lousy space-planning device. It will however look awesome from the air.
It's hard to understand the difference you are discussing since you only described one of the two choices given. A circle, since so much technicality has been requested, is a ridiculously narrow ring, one line thick. Obviously, a building could never be a circle, 3D humans wouldn't fit in a 2D structure. Are you thinking the ring compared to a disc?
 
"one will be a wide-angle camera with larger pixel sizes, a 6P lens, and optical image stabilization," Nope. Optical Image Stabilization is on the tele lens not the wide-angle.
[doublepost=1472917388][/doublepost]A small Bluetooth xceiver with a 3.5 might not be a bad option for some who don't want to go airpod. Wire w/ the xceiver can hang down or be stuffed anywhere and separate from the phone. Better than always having that wire tethered to the phone.
 
I think people should step back from knee-jerk condemnations of the new campus and put aside whatever biases they have towards Apple for whatever reason, whether it is dislike for Tim Cook, anger over obviously needed product updates, misplaced social justice bile related to tax rates or sourcing practices - whatever - and look at campus transport as simply another problem to solve. IOW, relax, and try to offer an original, capable solution instead of mocking the company.

IMO, getting around inside C2 is going to involve three different modes: manual, powered individual assist, and powered group assist.

Manual, in its most obvious form, is going to be walking. It may include shared bikes, personal skateboards, perhaps roller blades? Maybe Apple will encourage everyone to come up with their most innovative solutions.

Powered individual assist will most likely be the Segway, or some next gen version of it. Remember Steve Jobs reacting to the Segway when he was given a preview? No, not "It sucks!", but rather what he said in the period prior to launch: "This will change the way cities are designed." Perhaps the ring/circle/toroid/earth's home button/butthole design was his way of applying that idea.

Powered group assist will most likely be a moving walkway, but may also include some sort of maglev platforms or autonomous trams. Maybe we'll get a few steps closer to an actual hoverboard from this, though if it happens it will most likely be a captive board instead of one that can dart all over.
 
It's not actually THAT big, contrary to what people have said. It could be MUCH bigger and more impressive.
 
You are forgetting several things, but most importantly that the number one wanna be architect involved with this project was Steve Jobs. He thought he knew a lot about architecture, but in reality, knew not a lot. A gigantic ring (lacking even any skyways bicecting the interior courtyard, which would have helped a great deal) may have suited Steve's personal aesthetics but by no means does it make for great or even functional architecture.

Steve knew little about the actual nuts and bolts of being an architect, i.e. "in the profession of architecture", but his architectural design capabilities have been widely documented. The concept for the glass staircase in the flagship Apple Stores was his, along with the early layouts. The load-bearing physics were done by structural engineers but the design was his, exclusively.

So why do airports need moving walkways and carts? Because they are designed first and foremost to meet the very specific demands of aircraft. If you design a building specifically for people that requires these devices to make them work, then the practical aspects of the design are bound to be questioned. Rings are simply not efficient building plans, which is why you see them used so infrequently, and never on the scale we are seeing here.

The airport example is a very good one, but you have to consider that the star topology of an airport works for reasons that are very specific to that kind of operation. It does work, mainly because it becomes impossible to service a large number of planes from a monolithic design. An airplane takes up considerable room but all the foot traffic goes through a walkway thats typically less than 6 feet wide. A given sized building can therefore only serve as many planes as can safely fit its exterior boundary. So either the airport grows to be a 200,000 acre box the size of a small town, with a lot of wasted space, or you move towards a star topology. A central administrative area with functions delegated out on those walkways/tramways/peoplemovers. That reduces serviced square footage while allowing easier expansion.


A company would be better served by anything else than a star topology - which ironically is what Apple has now, with all its leased properties around Cupertino and the greater valley area. You could make a good case for a standard square, the operational favorite of companies for hundreds of years. But when the thing gets really huge, how are the commuting and interaction requirements of that building any better than the ring? In a very large, square building, how is it any easier for someone to go from their awesome corner office to their peer's equally awesome opposite corner office, if the building has one million square feet across 5 floors?

The concept of storing people and resources in a single building isn't new, but Jobs' concept of how to handle it truly is.
 
The best topology to minimize travel distance would be this:

Death_star1.png


Look. It even has a home button! :p
 
It's very nice but is it not risky to group everything there? I mean case flooding, earthquake or simply terrorist attack... The whole Apple company will be down in one single attack...

Not really. They have 2, now maybe 3 offices in NYC. Plus their old HQ, new one, North Carolina, bunch of SF offices, Austin TX, and a few other in the US. Then there's Ireland, China, etc.
 
I like the idea of it but in day to day life it seems impractical, I imagine it like this:
Damn I need a HDMI cable from IT..., a half hour to get on the other side of the building...,nah dont need the cable anymore...

They're not inventing the rumoured 'Apple Car' for nothing you know...
 
Many of the breakthroughs you list resulted from initiatives under Jobs. As for USB-C 3.1, that's not really an Apple breakthrough, and I would hardly call the MacBook a breakthrough when you can't even charge it and simultaneously use a USB peripheral without a $60 adapter.

Apple INTRODUCED the breakthrough. And what you say about USB-C? Do you understand that devices should be thought to be daisy chained, not star topology?
 
Apple INTRODUCED the breakthrough. And what you say about USB-C? Do you understand that devices should be thought to be daisy chained, not star topology?

But many, or most, of the USB peripherals used with the MacBook are USB 3.0. Not daisy chainable. Plenty fast for all sorts of uses.

And of course someone may want to use a USB peripheral with their MacBook while it's charging. That's a rather basic laptop feature, don't you think?
 
I think people should step back from knee-jerk condemnations of the new campus and put aside whatever biases they have towards Apple for whatever reason, whether it is dislike for Tim Cook, anger over obviously needed product updates, misplaced social justice bile related to tax rates or sourcing practices - whatever - and look at campus transport as simply another problem to solve. IOW, relax, and try to offer an original, capable solution instead of mocking the company.

IMO, getting around inside C2 is going to involve three different modes: manual, powered individual assist, and powered group assist.

Manual, in its most obvious form, is going to be walking. It may include shared bikes, personal skateboards, perhaps roller blades? Maybe Apple will encourage everyone to come up with their most innovative solutions.

Powered individual assist will most likely be the Segway, or some next gen version of it. Remember Steve Jobs reacting to the Segway when he was given a preview? No, not "It sucks!", but rather what he said in the period prior to launch: "This will change the way cities are designed." Perhaps the ring/circle/toroid/earth's home button/butthole design was his way of applying that idea.

Powered group assist will most likely be a moving walkway, but may also include some sort of maglev platforms or autonomous trams. Maybe we'll get a few steps closer to an actual hoverboard from this, though if it happens it will most likely be a captive board instead of one that can dart all over.

Most people will simply be placed near other people they need to access. For that reason, walking will be by far the thing most people use. Exception probably to getting to the parking lot, which in the morning will have one hell of a foot traffic so I'd expect some shuttles to the main building.
 
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