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Comment by poslathian | Hacker News Reader

5B for 13k employees - that's ~$384,000 in construction costs per head, operating and maintenance expenses are perhaps 5% of that annually (maybe more!) - taken together this is an office building that's costing apple ~$3500/head/mo . It's a beautiful office, but seriously?

Avg apple cash comp is what, 12500/mo? 3500 is almost 30% of that!

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You are missing the point. It's only an office because apple is a company. That could have been the great pyramids, saint sophia or notre dame.

Your calculations are off because you don't realize that while a lot of servants are enjoying their life in the castle, it's been built for the royal family and its court.

Yup. It's a status symbol that happens to be an office space.

it's just massive boring circle and i can show you immediately dozen more interesting buildings

now pyramids at the time of construction were massive engineering, this is just dumb boring building

I can show you a dozen more interesting looking phones than an iPhone, but an iPhone is still an iPhone.

"Massive" being the key word here.

Couldn't tell if you are being sarcastic, so excuse me for answering like you're not.

It doesn't match the artistic quality and cultural significance of st sophia or the pyramids, not even close. It's just a big glass and steel office space surrounded by a park. Sure the shape is not common, it's gonna have a few high-tech gimmicks and it carries the whole "apple" aesthetic, but it's rather blunt and feels generic (at least for me). Don't get me wrong, it's still a great project for what it is, just not the kind of project that you can call a monument a couple of centuries later

> It doesn't match the artistic quality and cultural significance of st sophia or the pyramids

That's what you think of it. But again, it's not been building for you. It's been built for the rich people at the top of Apple. It's massive. It's designed like an apple product. It fits their purpose of symbolism, the success of design and money, a place to put all their collections of brains for show.

What you think of it, your taste, or any feeling you can have about it is completely insignificant to them. They have the exactly the pony they want. It represents exactly what they want it to, like said monument represented exactly what the people that paid for it wanted it to.

Except it makes more sense to depreciate over the useful life of the building (standard: 50 years) which brings you to a more reasonable ~$8k/year/employee cost of building use.

If Apple is still a thing in 30 years do you think this will still be a cool place to be?

Apple will almost certainly still be a thing in 30 years. While it's hard to predict anything about fashion that far into the future, there are lots of buildings that are 30 or more years old that are cool places to be.

That's the beautiful thing about depreciation, it doesn't really matter. Depreciation is just a way to see how costs are being allocated over time, more realistically. It allows you to predict how much you have left to recoup on capex projects.

The real question (if you believe Apple will close down) is do you believe anyone will be interested in occupying the office space? Remember, the office could house more than one tenet. Or maybe they choose to offload the property in a sale.

It's the same principle I use when negotiating gym rental contracts: Schools aren't using their gyms all the time. They have downtime, i.e., they're undersubscribed, so they offer hours for rent at marginal cost.

> standard: 50 years

According to this study[0] 50 years is the maximum lifespan of a commercial building, not the standard. Over 50% of demolished steel commercial buildings were under 25 years old.

[0] PDF: http://cwc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/DurabilityService_L...

There's zero chance that building doesn't last 50 years, whether it's still being used by Apple 50 years from now or not.

That isn't what the study I linked to says. Did you read it?

Yea, that's not much of a study. The authors didn't have enough data to really understand why buildings were getting demolished before 50 years. Defining them as "wood", "concrete" and "steel" is far too broad of categories, for one.

A steel warehouse that was put up with the lowest cost bid is easy to demolish and rebuild with better, newer materials/technologies after 40 years or so. A state of the art office building is not.

How old is the Empire State Building? Do you think it's getting demolished any time soon?

Do you really think building construction techniques and materials of 50 years ago are comparable to the techniques and materials used today, especially on the Apple Campus?

Tim Cook has explicitly called it a 100 year bet.

5%? $250,000,000 a year to maintain a building? I don't know anything about building maintenance costs, but a quarter of a billion dollars a year seems a little excessive. How do you arrive at that figure?

Seems high. For residential real estate, you usually estimate 1% of a home's cost. So for the campus it would be $50M per year, which wouldn't surprise me in the least.

A lot of that would be energy costs as well, which the new building will have for much cheaper with the solar panels on the roof.

Maintenance and operating. It's not far off.

> 5B for 13k employees - that's ~$384,000 in construction costs per head

The building will cater for many more than that number of employees over its lifetime.

Remember that they're in one of the sunniest places in the US (at least during the summer) and are supposedly 100% self-contained renewable energy.

Energy costs are typically, and by far, the lion's share of the operating costs of a major building like this.

There is a difference between sunny and hot. Cupertino has plenty of sunshine, but is not hot so doesn't require a ton of energy for cooling (the building doesn't even have AC!). If they were able to pull this off in say, Phoenix, it would be a lot more of a cost savings.

> Jobs hated air-conditioning and especially loathed fans. (He vigilantly tried to keep them out of his computers.) But he also didn’t want people opening windows, so he insisted on natural ventilation, a building that breathes just like the people who work inside it.

Interesting. Still, the sunshine to energy need ratio in Cupertino seems to support low energy costs.

Redwood City, just to the north, is famous for having the "best climate in the world" by WW2 era gov't test.

The article mentioned in-floor heating/cooling hydronic loops.

If what he did at Pixar is any guide, in theory the return on this investment isn't comparable to typical buildings.

? Steve Jobs from beyond the grave?

Average Apple comp at HQ has to be a lot higher than that

from the company's point of view it's not a cash spend on employee benefits (the way bonus pay would be) but rather investment into a capital asset. the building itself retains a large amount of value over time, and under the right circumstances might even appreciate in value.

It might appreciate in value, but you would still need someone willing to pay $5B+ for it.

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