I wonder though - for those who read the article and have worked in both suburban environments and urban ones - would you rather work in the amazing Apple spaceship in the suburbs, or a normal office building in a city-center?
For me, I think I'd still prefer a short commute and the density of stuff that comes with being downtown.
My recollection is that "suburbs" is not really a good description. Suburbs bring to mind mostly residential neighborhoods with a few big shopping centers here and there, and not much within reasonable walking or biking range. Places where you find yourself often saying "I'll pick that up next time I'm in the city".
What it felt like to me was more like if you took several small towns and pushed them all close to each other. I could for the most part get around on my bike, but would occasionally want to go to something too far away (e.g., up to Stanford's bookstore for the annual Springer-Verlag sale).
Because it was like a bunch of small towns pushed together, with a layer of residential neighborhoods between them, there were almost always routes for biking between where I was and where the little pocket of density I wanted to be was that would mostly go through those very low traffic residential neighborhoods, so it felt much more safe and relaxing than biking in a major city.
(Wow. I just checked rent at the place I used to live. It was called the Villa Serra Apartments then, but is now called the Markham Apartments. I was paying $750/month for a 750 sq. foot apartment in 1991. Now they want between $3100 and $3800/month. Inflation alone would make $750 in 1991 about $1400 today. That's about 2.4% per year. To go from $750 to $3500 would be about 6.1% per year. Ouch!)
Closer to Apple the two exits on 280 backup all the way down the onramp from about 8 to 10 every weekday morning. Still bikeable but have to be very alert when on the main streets in the bike lanes.
I'm not convinced it's a beautiful building. It's a very careful building, trying to be a temple and - IMO - failing.
What's missing? Randomness. Playfulness. Quirkiness. Fun. Colour. Warmth.
Individuality. Art.
At Pixar, everyone was encouraged to personalise their work space in a creative way.
I can't imagine that happening here, because it would be a mortal wound to the purity.
My guess is that it will feel very subtly oppressive rather than delightfully liberating. It'll be a quietly productive environment, in a slightly manic way, but it's hard to be creative when everything and everyone around you has the same company standard officially-approved look and feel.
Ehhh? When I interviewed at Pixar it was mostly cubicles, some with two or three people in each cubicle area (higher ups would have nice offices that looked in on the cubicle areas, though).
That was my take-away as well. It struck me as a monument to just how gosh-darn clever Steve Jobs and Apple are, rather than a place at which the ordinary rank-and-file would want to work.
common, it's just massive boring circle, even Pentagon building is more original, there are only two things making this building interesting - size, Apple HQ
make it ten times smaller and put there unknown company and nobody would bother to read about it
Zaha Hadid designs beautiful but dysfunctional buildings.
nice design from outside doesn't mean it can't be practical inside
If Apple was Facebook or most modern web companies, the extra expensive of pods would have been spared to cram employees to stare at each other across tables in massive noisy rooms, usually with adequate natural light.
In this case Apple clearly is putting employees and their productivity first. At least they didn't choose Bella Hadid to design it, or god knows how much more impractical the inside would have been.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/sep/27/zaha-ha...
Honestly it's easier for me to commute out to the suburbs since I am going the opposite flow of traffic. Even though I will use the train to commute downtown it will be longer. Same if I decide to drive, downtown office is half the distance but will take double the time.
would you rather work in the amazing Apple spaceship in the suburbs,
or a normal office building in a city-center?
Add to that one neighbor who had a stupid pit bull that got out a lot, and bit two people.
On top of that, at one place I had neighbors across the street who had some stupid friends who drove up every day to pick up someone and honked their horn until that person came out of the house.
No, modified compact cars are a suburban thing. It's hard for a young person to modify their car when they don't have a garage. You can't modify your car with some POS muffler in a high-rise.
My girlfriend lives in a high-rise in a city. While there are occasional sirens and the regular sound of the subway train, there's no real traffic noise (not close enough to the freeway for that, this is pretty low-traffic residential), and certainly no yelling or loud music, and with the parking being in a parking garage with keycard access there's no worry about car vandalism either. I don't see any shitty modified compact cars there either. Overall, she seems to have less annoying noise than I had to deal with in my suburban homes that I used to live in. I'll take train noise over barking dogs any time. I don't know what the problem is with so many Americans that they just love the sound of dogs barking their heads off for hours and hours. But I only have seen this in suburbs and rural areas, never cities.
Also many of the individual orgs within Apple do have free snacks for their teams; it's not a campus-wide thing.
as with many, my work location changed long after I settled happily where I am at and seems to only move further away.
this is beautiful building which looks cool and like actual 2017, not that Apple thing which looks like something from 80s http://www.archdaily.com/778933/harbin-opera-house-mad-archi...
http://www.architectureartdesigns.com/breathtaking-harbin-op...
this might be efficient but it's extremely boring not worth articles
That said, my ideal workplace would be something like a studio apartment about 6-8 floors above ground, in a temperate climate, with good natural air circulation. In close proximity to the city centre with good food variety, or even better - with a kitchen and the time to cook for myself.