New Drone Video Shows Landscaping Progress at Apple Campus 2

[Michael Scrip]

Move-in day will be a bitch. All the employees, every single one of them are going to be disoriented for months.

It won't be a day. I'm assuming they will do it in stages... over time... department by department. But yes... it will be confusing for a while.

My question is... the new campus will hold 13,000 employees... and there are at least that many at Infinite Loop and many other places around the area already. So is the plan to finally get everyone under one (round) roof?

But Apple isn't getting rid of Infinite Loop... so there will be plenty of additional space there for more employees.

Hiring spree?

 

[Sill]

Glancing up from the keyboard and seeing my TV showing a really lovely dreamlike video of Hawaii on the Apple TV's screensaver, I'm thinking that, once the campus is done and all landscaped and pretty, it'd be cool if Apple put their excellent drone/helicopter video team to work making an official flyover/around video of the campus, for inclusion in the screensaver rotation (amongst other possible PR uses).

There is a little bit of a precedent for that, albeit an unofficial one. If you remember the "secret about box" easter egg from System 7.5.2 had a courtyard shot of 1 Infinite Loop. A faux flag flying in the breeze had the developer team heads on it, though a later update to 7.5.3 turned that photo into a lizard with the logo "Iguana Iguana Powersurgius" written under it.

It'll cost them a bundle upfront, but should pay off quite well over time. In addition, California has had a series of incentive programs to get the general public to install solar on their homes (thus reducing the strain on the state's electric grid); I don't know if they have anything similar for businesses. Besides "free" electricity and it just being generally a good thing to do, they'll also get PR points.

There is another benefit that is completely overlooked by everyone from the state to the press to the green folks: the elimination of transmission loss. Energy carried over cable for any distance loses its power as the distance increases due to resistance and a few other factors. Apple covering every available horizontal structure with solar cells and also building fuel cells nearby means they will generate lots of kW literally "on top" of the buildings that need it, hence practically zero transmission loss. I really have to congratulate the designers for doing this as it will provide so many benefits on so many levels both public and private.

For all the good extremely localized installations like those at Apple will produce, I wish more effort was spent on developing superconductive transmission lines. I've heard that due to the age of some transmission lines, the energy lost over a long distance eats up 80-90 percent of the generated power. Unfortunately an upgraded wire isn't as glamorous as large scale solar or wind installations, nor as politically popular, so we end up with crony-capitalist nonsense like Solyndra instead of something that could immediately reduce our energy burden with a simple retrofit of existing corridors.

 

[now i see it]

Anyone remember Nokia? That giant ring being built in Cupertino is being financed off the skeletons of Finland.
Kinda creepy really. Business is war.

 

[CarlJ]

Anyone remember Nokia? That giant ring being built in Cupertino is being financed off the skeletons of Finland.
Kinda creepy really. Business is war.

Huh? Nokia didn't die of war wounds, they died of an inability to adapt.

 

[Michael Scrip]

Anyone remember Nokia? That giant ring being built in Cupertino is being financed off the skeletons of Finland.
Kinda creepy really. Business is war.

Isn't Apple in a different league than Nokia ever was?

Even at their peak... the highest revenue Nokia ever recorded was $75 billion for the year.

But Apple has done that much revenue in a quarter.

And profit is a similar story.

So I'm not seeing the comparison there.

 

[randybsc]

Doesn't look like it will finish in 4 months!

It won't be.
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But does look like first workers could move into some smaller section by that time.

Full move would probraly still take several months if everything was complete.

Nope. Not in 4 months

 

[imageWIS]

Probably discussing back and forth what shade of space gray they will use for the next iPhone. There's no consistent "gray" between any of their product lines, even within them

It's hard to pay attention to details if the only thing you care about is thinness.

 

[somethingelsefl]

This is exactly what almost killed Apple in the 90s. When Jobs came back he talked about that. he cut the computer line to 4 products: consumer desktop(iMac), consumer laptop(ibook), pro desktop(g3 tower), pro laptop (powerbook)

Apple seems to be doing exactly what Jobs didn't want, they are complicating all of their product lines trying to please everyone.
Both the iPhone and iPad lines are becoming bloated. on the iPad side you have 3 sizes two of which have two models. There are three models of iPhone, this year's 6S/6S Plus, the two models from last year and the SE.
The Mac line is the same The Macbook will probably eventually replace the Macbook Air, but right now theres the Macbook, Macbook Air, Macbook Pro, and Macbook Pro Retina.

Apple really needs to clean up and simplify their product line to focus on making a few really great products.

You're leaving out a lot. It was Steve Jobs who diversified the company into the music player, Mobile phone, and TV product lines when many people cried the same argument you're making now "What happened to Apple's simplicity?"

You forgot that it was Jobs who took the iPod line from one product into the nano, shuffle, video/photo, etc versions. Each one of those lines had multiple color SKUs and capacities

Apple's simplicity is not in one product per category. Many companies do that and fail because when the category evolves or changes they are left without revenue. (Flip Video player for instance, Blackberry, etc).

Apple's simplicity lies in taking ONE CATEGORY at a time and attempting to do it well. Not like LG or Samsung, where they have multiple categories that they enter simultaneously (fridges, washers, phones, TVs).

 

[otternonsense]

I'm serious, the original iPhone, the greatest engineering achievement of our times, was built by
"few hundred engineers and designers"

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/m...-iphone.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&smid=tw-share&

Now, they have buildings for thousands of people and there is no results to be seen...
I think they simply became too big.

Amazing article, thanks for sharing!

God I miss Jobs.

 

[medazinol]

I really wonder what Apple employees are doing all day. 80% of their income comes from the iPhone,
still in one year they basically didn't touch it, sorry, they removed one plug - how much resources
did this "improvement" need? 10000 people working 8 hours/day for 360 days?
They didn't do anything else as we all know - no new Macs, no Apple TV, no improvements in their software.
Really strange.

All the money they saved from not updating products are going into the vanity campus

 

[twocents]

It's hard to pay attention to details if the only thing you care about is thinness.

Yeah talk about cutting corners... literally! It looks for now at least that 6.1mm is the magic number with the iPod touch 6G, iPad mini 4, and iPad Air 2 are all at that thickness. The iPhone may get close sans headphone jack

 

[Designx]

Think the stock will be below 80 when this thing opens?

 

[Chair-Sama]

Imagine just spending a fraction of this Apple and giving us updated rMBPs/MacPros/Mac Minis.

Apple is going through a vanity crisis.

well.....they are planing to spend 10billion on R&D this year....so.... .
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It won't be a day. I'm assuming they will do it in stages... over time... department by department. But yes... it will be confusing for a while.

My question is... the new campus will hold 13,000 employees... and there are at least that many at Infinite Loop and many other places around the area already. So is the plan to finally get everyone under one (round) roof?

But Apple isn't getting rid of Infinite Loop... so there will be plenty of additional space there for more employees.

Hiring spree?

Apple will steadily pull People from the other campus's and slowly fill their vacant positions (cupertino campus, austin campus, New York campus)
as well as for training purposes. right now, apple employees in other parts of the country usually get flown to austin or cupertino for any type of advanced or management training. this will allow them to free up more space in their other campus's primarily for training purposes, get more people trained properly in a more timely manner, and keep more of the Exec's and more sensitive information in the new campus.
TLr
More genius bar agents,
more secure information.

 

[Risco]

Imagine just spending a fraction of this Apple and giving us updated rMBPs/MacPros/Mac Minis.

Apple is going through a vanity crisis.

No, this is Steve Jobs last will and testament.

 

[JHankwitz]

If that drone video is current it looks like they've got somewhat longer than 4 months to wait for even the main building to be complete. The underground parking structure is still exposed with rebar still going in.

Absolutely right. They have a long way to go to make it operational. I don't see completion until the end of next year. Heck, most of the construction hasn't even been enclosed yet. After that, there's a s-load of stuff to be done before people can move in.