Apple Campus 2 to Feature Custom Designed 18-Foot Tables Inside 'Collaborative Pods'

[8281]

"Continuous single thin sheets of wood, which is then layered into a table top."

So plywood. It's nice plywood. Sorry, I mean the most elegantly and beautifully crafted layered sheets of pristine hardwood ever created. Wood like you've never seen it before.

 

[TallManNY]

Committed to environmental program: gets rid of plastic bags for paper.

Builds 100% solar powered new office: gets solid white oak desks 18ftx4ft x 500.

Makes sense.

Yep. Makes sense. Oak is a renewable resource. If you make an expensive desk out of it, it will encourage the tree farmer who provided the Oak to grow another one. We don't think about trees as being farmed, but really most of the ones we use are exactly that. Someone owns the forest and their numbers are managed with responsible foresting. Of course that doesn't happen so much outside of the developed world, but it could be done there to.

Not using trees though is not going to save them. It will just make them less valuable and then the land where they are grown will be used for something else.

 

[8281]

This table is a great item to have for a company like Apple. It's analogous to what Apple does with it's products and its vision on product development...

Taking a simple item that everyone already uses [and takes for granted] and making it better. By building it with such care and attention to details, with the best materials available, that it makes the product seem like it's new, reinvented somehow, and when you use an Apple product it makes you feel like you've never used one before.

So this table is perfect. Kudos to the person who picked it out for this new campus.

Does Tim Cook or Mr. Ive have your family in their basement or something? Good Lord...

 

[ThunderSkunk]

Every experienced custom millwork shop worth a hoot could build these without a challenge.
These are the most basic and simplistic tops, with none of the materials, design, functionality, or environmental requirements typically required by even medium high end residential or commercial clients.

Someone sold Apple on a "fairytale" story alright.

 

[flat five]

Every experienced custom millwork shop worth a hoot could build these without a challenge.
These are the most basic and simplistic tops, with none of the materials, design, functionality, or environmental requirements typically required by even medium high end residential or commercial clients.

Someone sold Apple on a "fairytale" story alright.

take any experienced custom millwork shop and show them this project and/or these tables.. they will be impressed.. all of them.
your statement is that of an inexperienced custom millworker.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

...they are built in the shop at final dimension then shipped and installed as such.. (which makes it much more difficult to get it from the dutch shop to it's intended home inside an office building in CA.. as in- 4'x6' sections at 220lbs vs 4'x'18' sections at 660lbs.. and there are hundreds of them )

The Intermodal shipping container is a 20' long container.
Transport isn't even an issue.
[doublepost=1459995882][/doublepost]

take any experienced custom millwork shop and show them this project and/or these tables.. they will be impressed.. all of them.
your statement is that of an inexperienced custom millworker.

My statement comes on the heels of 47 years and 5 generations in this industry.
Anyone impressed by this table has no idea what they're looking at.

 

[flat five]

The Intermodal shipping container is a 20' long container.
Transport isn't even an issue.

there's more to 'transport' than them sitting on a boat for a few weeks.
[doublepost=1459996181][/doublepost]

My statement comes on the heels of 47 years and 5 generations in this industry.
Anyone impressed by this table has no idea what they're looking at.

tbh, i don't think you understand what you're looking at.

those things aren't easy to do in this quantity at this quality nor are they cheap.

 

[thelookingglass]

Yeah, even with noise canceling headphones it can be trying. Sometimes you just need privacy to truly work on a problem. If they are optional collaborative spaces, I suppose that's ok.

Yeah, that's why I never understood why open collaborative spaces are all the rage. It's damn hard to get work done when people are constantly stopping by to chat.

 

[Bubba Satori]

So what's next, an article about the innovative Apple designed toilets they're installing in the john?

Jony wanted thinner, butt Angela didn't think it was fashionable.
http://www.AppleToiletRumors.com

 

[pika2000]

Such lame news. We want to know what kind of toilet bowl that Ive & team would approve. /s
[doublepost=1459999327][/doublepost]

Jony wanted thinner, butt Angela didn't think it was fashionable.
http://www.AppleToiletRumors.com

LOL. You beat me to the punch!

 

[wizard]

It sounds like the tables are made from layers of thick veneer.

That is what I'm thinking. If so this is a significant jump in capability because most veneers get operations, for plywood anyways, top out at 12 feet. Veneering has always impressed me with the way they can peel those big logs. Maybe I'm easy to impress but having done plenty of wood working over the years I have a feel for the difficulty.

Even more impressive is that most likely they have started out with even longer veneer and trim the table to final size.

 

[carrrrrlos]

it’s the thinnest most beautiful design we’ve ever made. Each table top is milled from a custom maple aluminum blend specifically designed for Apple. This revolutionary concept allows for multiple people to sit around one solid surface and interface like never before.

 

[TsMkLg068426]

Still waiting for a 18-foot iPhone to travel with.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

Wood doesn't come in those dimensions. That's a composited piece of several pieces of wood seamlessly joined together for those specs.

For those folks talking about creative spaces, NeXT and PIXAR were decades ahead of the rest in Silicon Valley concerning office collaboration layouts.

 

[Bubba Satori]

It’s “gouging” not “gauging.” It’s very hard to be taken seriously when you have a limited vocabulary and can’t spell. And by the way, your Apple hatred is showing. Aren’t there any Android or Windows forums you can haunt instead of here?

Ruh roh, here comes the banhammah. BOOM!!!

 

[wizard]

Gee you don't happen to work someplace in Rochester New York do you? You describe very accurately exactly what happens to a modern PC in a big corporate environment. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of PCs slowed down just so a few IT people can sit in their offices doing "remote management". Remote management generally means slowing down ones computer even more for no apparent reason.

Meanwhile my office is called a 'headquarters' (rather than a 'campus' - which is what all the cool kids use). Inside our 'headquarters' we have pretty generic white tables, and POS 'highly managed' Dells, slowed down by all software being launched remotely. Oh, and they have dual 17" monitors (I never get why the dual 17" monitors instead of decent-sized monitors - cheaper?)

Any jobs going Apple? I'll clean your toilets, pour the coffee and clean everybody's shoes...

[doublepost=1460000668][/doublepost]

Carving out a table from a tree is a lot of wasted wood. Not environmentally friendly.

Actually this is very good for the environment. Fist the wood is used efficiently this way. More importantly a harvested tree is havested carbon which remains tied up for as long as the table exists. While that carbon is tied up a new tree is growing in its place tying up even more carbon.

The only real problem with the use of wood is when it's harvesting isn't managed responsibly. You need to manage harvesting rates to make sure you aren't loosing acrerage too fast.
[doublepost=1460001519][/doublepost]

The Intermodal shipping container is a 20' long container.
Transport isn't even an issue.
[doublepost=1459995882][/doublepost]

My statement comes on the heels of 47 years and 5 generations in this industry.
Anyone impressed by this table has no idea what they're looking at.

OK convince me! Where would you buy 20 foot long veneers? If not veneers where can you buy laminated hardwood plywood this long, mind you with one piece veneers running the full length? Most of the sources I know about top out at 12 foot long veneers. I'd be very interested if you have sources, especially in the USA.

 

[patent10021]

"Forget about it Dave"

 

[Santabean2000]

Define worse. Because converting an entire countries measuring system so a few people across the water can be happy...... That seems worse.

Ha ha. Love the way USA folks think they are the world.

I think when you say "a few people", you mean THE ENTIRE PLANET bar Liberia, Myanmar and the good ol' USA!

Get with the programme dude!

 

[flat five]

OK convince me! Where would you buy 20 foot long veneers? If not veneers where can you buy laminated hardwood plywood this long, mind you with one piece veneers running the full length? Most of the sources I know about top out at 12 foot long veneers. I'd be very interested if you have sources, especially in the USA.

heh.. continuing along those lines..

where do you get a shaper bit to cut this profile:
?

..that's too big to even have a custom cutterhead made for it.. and even if you did make one, there's no machine to drive a bit this size.. solution is carving the profile with a 5axis cnc router:

...which begs the question- where do you get a 20' long 5axis cnc machine from? chances are, the machine was custom built for this project.. or certainly modified from any sort of stock machine.

thunderskunk saying "Every experienced custom millwork shop worth a hoot could build these without a challenge."..
cmon, just about every part of a project like this is a challenge.. one piece tables at 18' long are very very rare.. doors aren't this size.. custom millwork shops aren't producing things at this scale.. not much is standard with these table tops so every step of the way --> machinery/tools, shop carts/work tables, material, time, packaging, shipping, installing-- poses a challenge.. challenges that would most certainly be encountered by every experienced custom millwork shop.. most shops, even the good ones with highly skilled people, could not pull off this order.

 

[elmateo487]

Ha ha. Love the way USA folks think they are the world.

I think when you say "a few people", you mean THE ENTIRE PLANET bar Liberia, Myanmar and the good ol' USA!

Get with the programme dude!

Few people. As in. The 2 people complaining in this thread.

 

[Ghost31]

This might be a nice every now and then kinda workspace, but in general it's best to have a place to work without distractions. The book "Quiet" by Susan Cain explains it best. As great as collaboration is, we should be encouraging more alone time for people too to just sit and think and do work

 

[AliMacs]

No wonder the iPhone SE was released as in the same iPhone 5 series body frankensteined with the same assembly line parts. sir Jony was too busy making these tables. Jesus, I wonder if the bathrooms have urinals with FaceTime access.

 

[hiddenmarkov]

Ha ha. Love the way USA folks think they are the world.

I think when you say "a few people", you mean THE ENTIRE PLANET bar Liberia, Myanmar and the good ol' USA!

Get with the programme dude!

hey hey...some USA people. many expats like myself have come to embrace metric. It really is much better I find. Mildly good news is at least science is more standardized to use metric even in the US.



Rest of this...glad to see my money is buying nice things. Now can we get a promise from apple all this new fangled stuff actually gives some good ideas. If this buiding is all that is needed to give apple a kick in the ass to work on pro applications like they actually care...have at it. Not sure how a conference table in the old building caused this current stagnation from happening but hey....if feng shui style thinking gets them out of that rut its all good.

 

[edvj]

Define worse. Because converting an entire countries measuring system so a few people across the water can be happy...... That seems worse.

Few people..? Green = countries using metric system.
The Apollo Guidance Computer stored data internally in metric units,but displayed them as United States customary units.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer

 

[uroshnor]

Metric system.

Ugh.

18 feet x 4 feet, 660 pounds. Freedom units for the win.

You do realise that America has been officially metric since the 70's, its just no-one noticed.