Apple Park Opens to Employees in April
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I'm curious what their physical security will be like considering their secretiveness.
This space also is large enough for bootcamp, yoga classes, etc, and enough people will work there to find people willing to take part in such activities.
They could even 'hide' a basketball court inside if they wanted (dig a one feet hole to hold the court; surround it by a 3 foot 'wall' for spectators to hang around on; add trees and shrubs for camouflage, and nobody will see it from inside the building)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Communications_Head...
I guess the Apple version is somewhat more slender and (unsurprisingly for Apple?) a bit shinier.
I burst out laughing at this comment, because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism
Aristotle: the essential qualities of an object are those properties that make the thing what it is, without which it would not be that kind of thing
jonwachob91: a pentagon is essentially a circle
Aristotle: u wot m8
Also, I really appreciate whichever jurisdiction gave the go ahead and funded the expansion of the on/off ramps on Wolfe/280 (likely Cupertino?). The traffic in the area has become really miserable over the years and I'm hopeful that things are a bit better than the current De Anza Blvd situation.
Vallco/Stevens Creek will probably become more congested as a result of the new campus opening.
It'll likely be arduous for someone to move from one part of the building to the other, but I suppose Apple employees don't typically need to do this that much.
How long is the walk across the inner square by foot I wonder?
Walking would be just about as fast.
Apple operates door-to-door shuttles to SF and other population centers but that isn't really the point. The point is they have obviously provisioned enough parking to give each and every one of their employees a parking space, with some left over. It's just irresponsible given the traffic situation in the area, and to call it energy efficient is greenwashing.
https://www.trulia.com/for_sale/37.316929278047,37.342590905...
EDIT: I can easily make the case this has happened at Apple. Look at their iPad lineup, for example. How do I figure out which model to buy? IIRC, this lack of focus on the product line was one of the first things Jobs addressed when he returned to the company in 1997.
This is not to say that Apple isn't one of the most successful businesses ever. It argues against bigness. When you're that successful, you can't (it seems) help but make very expensive decisions rooted in hubris and grandiosity. Imagine what could have been done instead with a $1 billion new building and $4 billion in venture capital, for example.
The US government has the same problem. The amount of wealth captured from the overall economy gives government leaders/lobbyists too much power, and we get the f-35.
If only Steve Jobs had taken the traditional medicine route he would have been with us for another 50 years.
The Macbook 12" is an underpowered Fiscer-Price-like toy with a crappy keyboard and one (ONE!) USB-C port and nothing else... well, except a good screen.
The current MBA is a text-book example of an intentionally under-specified product designed not to undercut the more expensive offering. If they put a good screen into the MBA form-factor a lot less people would buy the MBP. People who can't innovate their way out of a paper bag are terribly afraid of cannibalization of existing product lines. Jobs wasn't.
One of the great things I think he did was to introduce the MBA and to drive down its price point so that lots of people could and did buy it. For all of his faults, I think he did have a democratic kind of vision that great computers should not be reserved for the rich.
Its unfortunate he chose to not use proven medicine as a treatment, though.
"Great things in business are never done by one person. They're done by a team of people." Steve Jobs
im pretty sure a lot of people use wired mice and have black boxes as their desktop computer case.
Wow talk about drinking the kool aid. Apple did not invent the wireless mouse, that honor belongs to Logitech[1].
[1]:http://www.macworld.com/article/1137400/input-devices/mouse4...
Once every few months you'll run into someone who uses a Magic Mouse, but it's practically a novelty item.
As far as I remember, every Mac user outside of schools was already on the Logitech mouse train back then, thanks to Apple's stubborn insistence that 1-button was the platonic ideal of computer input devices.
Personally, I had the Logitech S530 Cordless Desktop for Mac, which was a keyboard/mouse set that came out around the same time as the wireless Mighty Mouse did. The 8 buttons were great for Exposé shortcuts.
I strongly disagree with these classes of statements. Would we not have calculus without Newton? Great ideas tend to often happen simultaneously for a reason.
Building of more complex abstractions (metaphors in the context of language) allows us collectively to consider ideas that previously we could have never considered (i.e. it increases our perception). Julian Jaynes on the power of metaphor for unlocking new ideas:
> All of these concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects. Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication.
If Jobs and crew hadn't done what they did, someone else would have. The timeline may not have been the same, but even 'geniuses' must exist within the context of their society and world.
I can't. I'm not usually a fan of the Great Man theory of history, but I literally cannot think of any individual working in electronics/computing/software with a similar set of abilities and drives.
By default, computer systems tend to be ugly and hard to use. It took someone who wasn't primarily a developer or engineer to push the field in a different direction.
There really aren't many people with entrepreneurial skills and aesthetic sense who can manage engineers in anything like the same way.
That's a mighty fine assumption you are making there. Please share with me how you know this? Are you a future seeing oncologist that can see how his body would have reacted to specific treatments, or maybe you know more details than the rest of us about the exact mutation?
His chances would have dramatically increase had he used traditional medicine.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/health/hindsight-is-kind-t...
It would have been far more efficient to build the thing as a few 12-14 story buildings in the nearest city.
[edit] Plus: "It is also the site of the world’s largest naturally ventilated building, projected to require no heating or air conditioning for nine months of the year." That's probably tough to do with a box in the city.
Apple has taken away precisely what from the public by replacing it with this?
I don't think anyone here is saying this is awful. It's just not necessarily praiseworthy.
The standard 12 story mid-rise buildings in DC are built with glass walls so that light doesn't get caught in outer offices.
The amount of space we use for office parks is tiny in comparison with the amount of space we use for agriculture. Only 3% of the land used in the US is urban sprawl-- less than the total acreage of a single crop, alfalfa hay. https://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002h...
Of course, Cupertino's public transportation sucks. But so does San Francisco's, even though it's tiny. Maybe stop bragging about where you live, and find something else to be a snob about.
I very much enjoy the worry-free experience with zero environmental impact and maintenance cost of wired compared to wireless mice and keyboards. You can pry them from my cold, dead hands.
I still use a wired mouse, because it's superior to a wireless mouse.
My laptop happens to be black and happens to not be particularly attractive, but it's superior to an Apple laptop.
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While being given a tour of the rapidly advancing Apple Campus 2 site, Fry suggested it should be named after Jobs, who died in 2011 but was heavily involved with the early stages of planning.
“Oh, Steve made his views on that very clear,” said Tim Cook — hinting that the idea was discussed, but that Jobs wasn’t a massive fan of it.
Source: http://www.cultofmac.com/323857/apples-new-spaceship-hq-coul...
Somehow I doubt the construction of this facility incurred any meaningful "expense" to any of "the people who live there"
Who do you think financed this? Apple consumers and investors (I am one) that's who, not taxpayers. Why should it be open to the public? If it were a government project it would still be under construction for the next 10 years.
> The public has had to endure all of the construction and has lost a large amount of land-space that could have been used for the community.
Or, in reality, Apple bought the real-estate, and pumped hundreds of millions (actually I just looked it up, it is billions with a B) of dollars into the economy and put scores of construction, engineers, and high skilled people to work building it. This isn't soviet Russia comrade.
Huh? The site they built on wasn't green field, they purchased previously constructed commercial real estate, knocked it down, and then built up their new campus. Look at this image: http://i.imgur.com/lzAbM0R.jpg
Please explain to us how the old use of the space was used by the community? All I see are commercial buildings and car parks. Because to me it seems like what Apple are doing with it (e.g. planting trees) will be far better for the local area than what was there previously.
The ironic thing is that you likely only posted this because Apple called it a "park" and has planted a ton of greenery. You assumed it was a green field site before without checking, and claimed Apple stole it "from the community." If anything Apple has improved the local area dramatically with this development, they've added a park, not stole one.