A Peek At Apple's Planned $5B HQ 257
theodp writes "The Mercury News has an exclusive sneak peek of Apple's planned headquarters in Cupertino, which Steve Jobs personally sought approval for in 2011. 'We found that rectangles or squares or long buildings or buildings with more than four stories would inhibit collaboration,' Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said, explaining the motivation behind the so-called Apple Ring. Nice, but if you wanted to hurt the feelings of the Design Gods at Apple, you could point out that, for all its $5 billion glory, what Apple calls 'the best office building ever' doesn't look all that different from an old-school $3.95 6250 BPI magnetic tape reel (still available on eBay, kids!)."
With all due respect... (Score:5, Insightful)
So what if it looks like a tape reel?
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Re: With all due respect... (Score:2)
Re:With all due respect... (Score:5, Funny)
Looks like a "walled garden" to me.
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My thoughts exactly. The company mind-set personified.
I wonder if they will have unicorns in their internal garden?
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Looks like a Panopticon to me. Except the iSight in every monitor makes the central tower obsolete.
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I wondered if it would have rounded corners.
It's got one. Or rather it is one!
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So what if it looks like a tape reel?
It reminds me of the Pentagon. Circular instead of pentagonal, of course, but the proportions look very similar. I guess the Pentagon is almost a marvel of office design, it just needs to be rounded out a little more?
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Apple _does_ have a patent on rounded corners.
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I
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Another solution to add to that list of several likely solutions: Eveyone will need a really good compass.
And, it'll most likely be something like that as an iPhone app.
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or use nanometers
Re: With all due respect... (Score:2)
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Headline: "Wheel shaped thing looks vaguely like other wheel shaped thing!" Stop the presses.
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It's a reference to the fact that many Apple products look like other [visual.ly], older products [blogspot.com].
There is of course no shame in taking inspiration from what other people are doing. That's the way the world works and we are all better for it. Apple's problem is they then try to patent the design and sue the person they copied for using it.
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You mean like the Top of the World restaurant? http://www.topoftheworldlv.com/topoftheworld.htm [topoftheworldlv.com]
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It looks like a tire (Score:2, Insightful)
A 1/2" reel of computer tape has a much smaller hub diameter.
Pentagon (Score:2)
Typical Apple. They are re-inventing the Pentagon (the DOD headquarters).
Maybe they should have several headquarters---in different colors.
Re:Pentagon (Score:5, Informative)
The Pentagon? No, but you're thinking is the right general direction: Another agency did it first [wikipedia.org].
This takes the prize. (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, gotta be funny. In Soviet Russia, Apple trolls
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Truly there are things about Apple for which we can be critical. An office building is not one of them.
Personally, I think the building is cool. I think that companies should do better than to just shove their workers into cubicle farms and expect them to be happy and productive.
That doesn't mean that this project should be above criticism. It's more than just a building; or even an ordinary campus. It's a one-of-a-kind project. Projects like this are risky; if this doesn't work out Apple will own one giant, very expensive white elephant. What's more lavish corporate headquarters are often a sign that a co
Re: This takes the prize. (Score:2)
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It's more than just a building; or even an ordinary campus. It's a one-of-a-kind project.
Wow, someone has been drinking the kool-aid. The ring design with glass walls is well tried and tested. Modern buildings tend towards large glass sides to let in as much natural light as possible, since it is now well understood that natural light is better than artificial for humans and large panes of glass have got a lot cheaper. The ring structure is extremely old and well understood as a good way to get lots of space without requiring people to walk long distances to get around. The Pentagon is an obvio
It's a long walk! (Score:2)
WIth a diameter of about 1/3 of a mile a collaborator will need to walk about 1/2 mile for a face to face in the other's office on the opposite side of the ring. Good exercise but perhaps a waste of time.
And where's the write ring?
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Maybe they'll group people together along the ring in such a method that that walk isn't required.
Or have a monorail on the third floor.
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WIth a diameter of about 1/3 of a mile a collaborator will need to walk about 1/2 mile for a face to face in the other's office on the opposite side of the ring. Good exercise but perhaps a waste of time.
And where's the write ring?
Collaboration isn't spread across buildings in Infinite Loop. Each section will be specifically designed to provide for a collaborative work flow. You don't put some Engineering here, some design there, etc.
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>>
Architects in the early 20th century came up with an interesting solution to this: use a third dimension, and install elevators. Now you can walk horizontally in two dimensions, and travel up/down, bringing a large company's employees all within relatively short distances of each other.
That crossed my mind but it's not as cool as Jobs' solution. On the other hand, not being a genius innovator, I think I'd like my office to be on the opposite side of the ring from the CEO's.
Re:It's a long walk! (Score:5, Funny)
No glass walls. No diagonal travel. Fewer buttons than a Wonkavator. Lame.
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Yes, but then in the 1930s, the Port of New York Authority built their Inland Terminal #1, 15 complete floors, many banks of elevators, and a complex three-dimensional maze-solving problem required to get from one place to an
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You'd think so, but in reality there's greater isolation between floors than mere distance. If the land is cheap enough, always go horizontal.
I'd be willing to bet that Apple employees will treat travel to areas directly above/below them as if it were "further" than walking half way around the ring on their own floor.
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I've worked in skyscrapers and haven't really found that to be true. Especially within your bank of floors, e.g. if your department is floors 15-20, people treat it as pretty local.
Re:It's a long walk! (Score:5, Interesting)
Then you didn't have a choice but to work vertically. But I've seen it in campuses with long 4-5 story buildings. People looking for an empty meeting-room will go to the other end of the building before they go one floor up. They'll swap offices on the same floor without a thought, but will announce changing floors like they are going to work in a different building, or even for a different company. They'll walk down the length of the building on a whim to see if someone's in their office, but will ring upstairs first to check first to avoid a "wasted trip". Totally different psychology.
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You'd think so, but in reality there's greater isolation between floors than mere distance. If the land is cheap enough, always go horizontal.
What are you doing, training long distance runners?
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Re:Wait for the Inevitable (Score:5, Informative)
Samsung: Korean HQ [mediameerkat.com]
Gates Foundation: Seattle HQ [finecomposition.com]
Microsoft:Redmond Campus [msdn.com]
What the building really is ... (Score:2)
Now that Steve Jobs is gone, Apple need another Reality Distortion Field Generator. Why not think big? ...
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Its a synchrotron light source. Compare with pictures of APS, SPring8 and ESRF.
DECtape (Score:2)
Actually, it looks more like a DECtape.
At the Church of Apple (Score:3)
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I'll take the one in Rome - much better artwork.
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But the one in Rome is infested with batshit crazy brainwashed doomsday cult members obsessed with sex they do nothing know about.
I thought you were going to explain why it's not like Apple?
(Sent from my iPhone or MacBook or MacMini.)
Minimizes window space (Score:2)
The only way to get even less window space in relation to interior volume would be to design it as a sphere. Even a borg cube would have more windows.
May I suggest a modest design improvement: dig a canal to the bay and moor Steve Job's equally iconic and ugly yacht [theverge.com] right in the center of the frisbee ring. The point is so nobody forgets him, right?
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Actually the converse is true. It pretty much maximizes window space. A sphere has the LEAST surface area for a given volume, followed by a cube. This has much MORE surface area for a given volume.
The Ring... (Score:5, Funny)
One ring to rule them all...
Re: The Ring... (Score:2)
First you see the Ring and then you die.
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I was thinking the same thing.. lets do the whole poem.
Three Rings for tech CEOs seeking the prize
Seven for the Congress-men sucking Apple's Bone
Nine for the hipster kids, doomed to sigh
One for the Steve Jobs in his dark home
In the land of Cupertino where the IOS lie
An iPod to snare them all, an iPhone to find them
An iPad to daze them all and in the shininess bind them
In the land of Cupertino where the IOS lie
C'mon, Can't You See a Certain Resemblance? (Score:2)
Comparison: $5B Planned Apple HQ and Old-School Magnetic Tape Reel [staticflickr.com]. Would look even more similar with a white write ring [wikipedia.org]! :-)
Overhead Shot (Score:2)
Overhead Shot: $5B Planned Apple HQ and Old-School Magnetic Tape Reel [staticflickr.com]. Less tape would increase the resemblance!
Looks just like Spy Central UK (GCHQ) (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Communications_Headquarters [wikipedia.org]
All all glass building with lots of computers and the terminals with the world's secrets flashing across. An interesting concept.
Re:Looks just like Spy Central UK (GCHQ) (Score:4, Interesting)
Except that GCHQ cost £337 million. Is the Apple building really expected to cost $5B? It is not mentioned anywhere in TFA. Seems excessive even for Bay Area , where fixing up half a bridge [wikipedia.org] costs $6.3 billion.
What kind of a critique is that? (Score:5, Insightful)
doesn't look all that different from an old-school $3.95 6250 BPI magnetic tape reel
Or a ring, bracelet, flying saucer, hoola hoop, donut, or a million other things that are round. What is your point?
Re:What kind of a critique is that? (Score:4, Informative)
doesn't look all that different from an old-school $3.95 6250 BPI magnetic tape reel
Or a ring, bracelet, flying saucer, hoola hoop, donut, or a million other things that are round. What is your point?
News flash! Round things look like other round things! How could Apple not have seen this coming!?!?
Who else thinks it'd be fun to sneak onto the roof (Score:2)
Who else thinks it'd be fun to sneak onto the roof ... and paint the roof like a giant Stargate?
Our economic overlords (Score:3)
I have to wonder about a company who has lost 30% of it's stock price in the last year building a $5B headquarters.
I mean, I'm grateful to AAPL, since it put my daughter through college, but I gotta say, I'm glad I got out at $680.
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I have to wonder about a company who has lost 30% of it's stock price in the last year building a $5B headquarters.
When you're sitting on $147 billion [bgr.com] in cash, $5 billion for new headquarters is quite affordable... whether or not it's the best possible use of that money, I don't know, but it's definitely not going to bankrupt Apple.
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It's not a question of bankrupting Apple, it's a question of the kind of decisions the CEO and CFO and the board are making. The people who own the company (shareholders) have to decide whether or not those decisions make sense.
Apple paid a dividend this year in an effort to put a
Its like Main Street in Pleasantville. (Score:2)
Walled Garden (Score:2)
It's obviously Steve Job's Walled Garden!
Conveyance (Score:2)
Without some kind of conveyance system this building is going to be next to useless. Either some kind of shuttle or miniature rail system, maybe even those horizontal escalators they have in airports would do the job. But no one is going to work in a building where you have to walk several miles every day. And whats with all of the soft focus renderings? Was the software they were using so bad that they had to blur every single image to make them look less crappy?
sure its not over 4 stories (Score:2)
but you still need to walk up to half a mile to get somewhere, and there is no elevator option.
I'd rather spend 2 minutes waiting for a lift to go up 10 floors than walk for 7 minutes to go see someone.
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How do you know that?
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Because elevators go up and down, not round and round.. No mention of a mile long moving walkway either.
This is Apple we're talking about (Score:2)
This building is not a circle, it's an infinigon.
It's still in Cupertino (Score:3)
Building that in Cupertino is a good thing for the city. It's a blah suburb.
Now here's a prestige research center [glpsf.com] - IBM Alamaden Research Center. That place produced several Nobel Prizes. It's on an isolated mountaintop. You drive for a mile after entering the property before reaching the buildings. The view from the cafeteria is of mountains, with no other buildings in sight.
It's also half-empty since IBM cut back.
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Unless you are on the first floor and can walk across a courtyard a ring is really a long building looped so the ends connect.
With a linear building of length L, the max distance between two offices is L. For a circular building, it is L/2.
It seems very inefficient to me. A simple cube would very likely be far better than this design.
Most people don't like working in offices that receive no natural light.
Re:Ring = Long Building (Score:5, Funny)
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Sounds like another resident of Silo 18.
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Unless you are on the first floor and can walk across a courtyard a ring is really a long building looped so the ends connect.
With a linear building of length L, the max distance between two offices is L. For a circular building, it is L/2.
Which is why the GP mentioned a cube, rather than a liner building.
Even multiple linear shorter buildings side by side with sky bridges over interior open space would
more efficient.
This is also why Buildings tend to grow taller, because in addition to needing less land,
elevators are faster than walking.
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With a linear building of length L, the max distance between two offices is L. For a circular building, it is L/2.
You sure? The maximum distance between two offices in a filled circular building is equal to its diameter (L). If it's empty inside, it's pi*L/2 - which is larger than L.
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If you aren't willing to cross the courtyard, like when it's raining, L/2 is correct. He define L as the length of the building, which when warped into a circle is still L. If you are willing to take a shortcut through the courtyard, then it's only L/pi.
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You're both wrong. L is the linear size of the unrolled strip. If it is straight, the ends are L apart. If the same size strip is rolled in a circle, no point is farther than L/2 away from any other point in walking distance along the strip. If you walk across the courtyard, you cut L/2 to L/pi for the worst case.
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Right. For a bunch of nerds I'm surprised how difficult this is for some.
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For a bunch of nerds I'm surprised how difficult this is for some.
That's the average autodidact for you...
Re:Ring = Long Building (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I wonder why R&D is shuffled off to the rectangular buildings away from the glorious ring.
Why don't they like those engineers?
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It is called design over function, I pity the commuter employee already. This follows the pattern though, remember that ridiculous yacht design Jobs planned?
Yup, the Jon Ive approach to office space.
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Right. And a cube of the same area per floor would have a maximum distance between offices on a given floor roughly 1/5 that of this foolish design.
Not to mention the sprawl of this monstrosity. It appears from the drawing to have only 4-5 floors. By increasing the number of floors to say 20 you could also markedly reduce the average distance between offices.
Absolutely potty (toilet bowl like) design.
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"On a given floor"
And there's the thing.
This design gets everyone into 4 stories, and probably will use long ramps between floors, instead of stairs (like the Pentagon does) This means you can easily *walk* to any office, instead of spending time standing in a box being lifted up and down, or powering up or down 15 flights of stairs. And like a poster above me says, in a long straight building, the maximum distance between two offices is L, in this building it is L/2 (because the ends are connected) Couple that with bein
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You are still going to need a parking lot. Presumably it will be sized for the number of occupants so the area will be the same.
Long ramps between levels will really suck. Suppose the office you want to go to is directly above yours. Now you have to walk to where the ramp is, negotiate the ramp, and then return.
If you are on say the 4th floor and want to cross the courtyard and go to an office on the 4th floor on the other side navigating 8 ramps would really be a PITA.
The surface area of this design is als
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To reach the same fourth floor on the opposite extreme, why would you descend four floors, walk 540 meters straight, then go back up four floors? You could just walk around the perimeter on the same floor for 800 meters. The worst case around the perimeter between any two points is seven minutes walking. The mean case is three and a half minutes. Likely the median case is less than that, as the distribution of workers is presumably intelligently laid out. It's nice that you presumably have the choice, thoug
Wrong company; Borg == Microsoft (Score:2)
Your shitty borg cube doesn't have any natural light except the few outside spaces. If you had any imagination, you would have specified a hemisphere, or even a sphere with one half of it underground. Or bury the whole sphere a la the Umbrella bunker under Raccoon City. Then it wouldn't take up ANY land area.
A sphere is the smallest possible envelope, with the least surface area, for any given volume.
But the Apple design is far superior esthetically, much more realistic to construct, and still extremely erg
Re: Ring = Long Building (Score:2)
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You mean ... going ... *gulp* outside?
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Unless you are on the first floor and can walk across a courtyard a ring is really a long building looped so the ends connect. It seems very inefficient to me.
They're building it this way so they can host the Segway 500.
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However it doesn't feed ego. Really, really, want to throw huge amounts of money away, do curved buildings. It adds levels of complexity to construction and associated cost beyond anything people outside of the construction industry appreciate. Not only does it cost at lot (basically doubling or tripling construction costs) but it is enormous wasteful in internal space utilisation. With sales falling I would wonder why Apple investors would allow this Apple corporate executive ego driven indulgence.
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Apple hasn't teched far enough to unlock the warp core.
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I think I would hate to work in that building. Driving up to it every day and seeing all those angles and protrusions. I kinda got anxious just looking at the photo.
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Clever, it's shaped like a benzine ring, bringing to mind organic chemistry.
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If Apple hardware is mediocre, what is high end hardware?
(Note: I am a Linux fanboy and generally avoid Mac HW due to it's poor Linux support)
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The Pentagon ... is a building.
You said it first. That's the first thing that came to mind when I saw it. This is the great innovation they came up with after 70 years.
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This is what companies do when they have too much cash. How much is this building per square foot?
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Usually people make quips about Apple's "no button mouse" as a joke, because of Apple's history of one button mice. The physical button is still there, and provides the expected tactile feedback. Apple's mice and trackpads also provide support for buttons, scrolling, and other operations via gestures. It's not ideal for people who expect tactile feedback, but it does work well.
While their chicklet keyboards are no Model M, they also perform as well as traditional laptop keyboards and most modern desktop
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Texas has too many fags.
You're right; staying adjacent to San Francisco should help them avoid the queers. /facepalm