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The Almighty Buck Media Space Apple News Technology Build Hardware Science

A Tour of Campus 2, Apple's Upcoming Headquarters (popsci.com) 119

Posted by BeauHD from the revolutionary-design dept.
Dave Knott writes from a report via Popular Science: Popular Science has an article detailing Campus 2, Apple's upcoming headquarters, including a video with a tour of the complex which is still under construction. The Spaceship, as many have nicknamed it, is over one mile in circumference and when it is completed later this year it will house 13,000 employees. Its exterior will largely be composed of thousands of huge curved glass planes; the floors and ceilings will be constructed from hollow concrete slabs that allow the building to "breathe," bolstering its eco-friendly qualities. Campus 2 will run entirely on renewable energy, with rooftop solar panels providing an output of 16 megawatts of power and acting as the campus's primary energy supplier. Upon completion, the main building will have four stories above ground and three below, with numerous other facilities including seven cafes, a fitness center and a 120,000 square-foot theater where Apple will hold its famous product announcements. Construction on the building is expected to be finished by the end of 2016. Interesting facts: Apple used 4,300 concrete slabs, weighing a total of 212 tons, to create the structure. The Spaceship also features 330-ton, 92-foot-tall steel reinforced doors for its restaurant -- the dining-hall doors alone span 60,000 square feet and collectively weigh 330 tons. The campus boasts 900 panels of vertical glass, 1,600 panes of canopy glass, 510 panes of clerestory glass, and 126 panes for skylight glass (3,000 total). The total cost of the project is approximately $5 billion.
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A Tour of Campus 2, Apple's Upcoming Headquarters More

A Tour of Campus 2, Apple's Upcoming Headquarters

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  • 330-ton restaurant doors? (Score:3)

    by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Saturday June 11, 2016 @05:47AM (#52294203) Homepage

    I don't always build environmentally friendly campuses, but when I do, the restaurant doors are 92 feet talk and weigh 330 tons. Because energy efficiency when opening them.

    • Don't worry, they are needed to stop the whole building floating away, since all its concrete slabs only weight 212 tons in total ;)
      This is really a new low in the example of 'believe anything because... APPLE!', really, this summary is glaringly ridiculous.

    • And on the 92 foot doors these words appear:
      'My name is Applemandius, king of kings:
      Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Even more impressive is that, at 92' tall, they are several stories taller than the building itself!

      How can a magazine with the word 'Science' in its name be able to produce such nonsense?

      Presumably the doors are 92' wide, and only as tall as the building (52').

      dom

    • As the doors are likely simple swinging or sliding doors: they don't use much energy.
      You had a point if the doors are lifted up and sliding down.

      Hint: try to push a car. A single person easily pushes a two tons car, as soon as the car is moving you can push it as far as you can walk.

      • So Spoke just need to get 165 people to open or close their cafe doors? Hint: That's not how static friction works.

        Basically no pivot will work well for a 330-ton swinging door, and you'd need something like railcar wheels to make it roll. How well can you push a few fully loaded railway freight cars?

        • Good grief, this phone keyboard is awful. That post should start "So Apple..."

          • The 330 ton is given as a collective weight, but I am not sure what the 92 feet is unless that is the height if all the doors are stacked. It however makes no sense at all. Why give the collective weight and height of the doors like that is some kind of measurement of anything useful?

  • Anecdotal evidence (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OpenSourced ( 323149 ) on Saturday June 11, 2016 @05:53AM (#52294213) Journal

    It's said that, usually, when a company builds some "flagship headquarters", that marks the apex of said company, and it's all downhill from then on. We'll see.

    • Well, if an innovative company has too much cash in the bank . . . you would think that they would invest it in new technology R&D projects, instead of building luxury cubicles.

      In the case of Apple, they could invest in new Cloud, Cognitive and IoT technologies!

      On second thought, maybe those luxury cubicles aren't so a bad investment, after all, compared with the alternatives.

      • Elon Musk is a bit critical about silicon valley, saying that there is too much talent bound by internet startups.

        I think he is right. We do need people to innovate in many other areas as well, and apply the same kind of "disruption" in non-software markets. Tesla is really disrupting the car industry, and there are many more industries.

        I think one sector which still can see lots of growth and innovation is the medicine sector. We haven't understood so many processes in the body, and health issues impact th

        • , the threat of islamism and other despotist ideologies,

          Disclaimer: I am an athiest, verging on being anti-theist.

          I think you mean the threat of extremism. Islam is not the problem, a bunch of nutjobs claiming to represent it is. Because I can bet my bottom dollar that you would not have substituted christianity into that sentence without toning it down.

          And if you banned islam tomorrow, nutjobs would claim to represent something else. It might take a generation to find that something, but they would.

          • You did notice that he wrote "Islamism", not "Islam", right?

          • Disclaimer: I am an athiest, verging on being anti-theist.

            I think you mean the threat of extremism. Islam is not the problem, a bunch of nutjobs claiming to represent it is.

            Extremism is not the problem.

            If you hold a parade, and you allow a bunch of nutjobs to notice the parade, and then walk in front of it as if they are leading it, then when the cameras show up, you let them speak for you, while you stand mutely behind them... those people *ARE* your leaders.

            And just to be fair about things:

            (1) This is exactly what happened with the Tea Party, when Sarah Palin decided to run home and get her baton and majorette uniform, and march in front of their parade (looking back periodi

        • It looks as though politics is being disrupted right now.

        • Tesla is really disrupting the car industry, and there are many more industries.
          Because other companies did not get their ass up. And because they were slaves to the oil industry. I really wonder that Musk did not die to a mysterious accident.

          The technology, not as advanced than right now, to have cars run electric, we have since over a hundred years.

          Around 1900 basically all "delivery cars" where electric. Around 1985 all concept electric cars were similar to Tesla's except for range.

          Also, I think politics

      • In the case of Apple, they could invest in new Cloud, Cognitive and IoT technologies!
        Why should they? this argument is so typical American, I don't grasp it.

        The Cloud market is saturated by Google, Amazon, even Microsoft. Why would anyone sane invest into that? Oh: because he has more money and can use that as a weapon to kill the competition. What benefit does that have? I tell you: none at all.

        Cognitive Technologies are very special things, why should a company that has no experience at all invest into th

        • Why should they? this argument is so typical American, I don't grasp it.

          Yes, sarcasm and irony are very difficult for folks from the Third Word to grasp.

  • Or do the cafeteria doors actually weigh 1.5x as much as the total amount of concrete used to build the thing.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by msauve ( 701917 )
      It's a very poor summary. There's this:" Apple used 4,300 concrete slabs, weighing a total of 212 tons, to create the structure. The Spaceship also features 330-ton, 92-foot-tall steel reinforced doors for its restaurant -- the dining-hall doors alone span 60,000 square feet and collectively weigh 330 tons."

      Work the math, and those concrete slabs weigh about 100 lbs. each. I don't think so. And is that "doors" or a single "collective" door?

  • Waste of the shareholders money. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This whole project seems like a gigantic waste of the shareholder's money. Sure, when you have a mostly salaried workforce, it is fiscally prudent to have a nice workplace, to keep those salaried workers at work & doing lots of unpaid overtime, but this project is just way over the top. I doubt that this $5 billion workplace will make the workers any more productive than more conventional $500 million campus would.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lucm ( 889690 )

      your own real estate is usually a sound investment but if Apple needs to sell, the only kinds of companies who could afford to buy this thing would rather build one, so that leaves oil sheiks and China. Or they could transform it in condos and try to sell them to the same crowd of phonies who stopped buying their products and triggered the whole nosedive in the first place.

      • if Apple needs to sell, the only kinds of companies who could afford to buy this thing would rather build one, so that leaves oil sheiks and China.

        It'll be nice office space. If and when Apple shrinks enough that they don't need it anymore, it could easily be subdivided into wedges that are rented out to whatever other firms are growing at the time. No need to allocate the entire thing at once. What you're saying is like complaining that few people can afford to buy the entire Empire State Building so i

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by lucm ( 889690 )

          That building cost 5 billions. That's twice the current value of the Empire state building, and it's located in a tiny city which is more than 1h drive from SF. If you think other "firms" could populate that huge space in a cost-effective manner, it's probably best if you don't begin a new career in commercial real estate.

          • The original Apple campus is really six separate office buildings that happened to be arranged in a circle with a central courtyard; the new Apple campus is essentially eight separate office buildings that happen to be physically adjacent so as to look like one big round building. There are literally hundreds (possibly thousands?) of firms in Silicon Valley that could profitably use either one of those 1/8th wedges or a single floor of a 1/8th wedge = 1/32nd of the total space).

            The new campus has roughly

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by lucm ( 889690 )

              You fail to grasp the financials. Google paid 300 millions for their headquarters. Apple is spending FIVE BILLIONS on theirs. That's the equivalent of buying Google's headquarters every year for 15+ years. There is no way Apple could rent any slice of that thing and break even. The rent for the whole thing would have to be north of 25 millions per month (plus utilities etc), there's just no way to make that work no matter how many firms would truly agree to move to Cupertino.

              Yes, companies in Silicon Valley

              • http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/2... [cnn.com]

                As of 07/2015, Apple had 203 billion cash on hand. Do you think a $5 billion building is so much more than a company acquisition such as recently announced Linkdin ($26 billion)?

                They need a new campus, they can afford to buy a nice one, how is it bad spending to build a nice building in SV?

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by lucm ( 889690 )

                  First of all, no they don't have 203 billions.

                  The problem with Apple’s “cash pile” is that most of it is not actually “cash” nor “on hand,” and it doesn’t take into account Apple’s debt. Apple has about $16.7 billion in cash and equivalents on its balance sheet.

                  source: http://www.marketwatch.com/sto... [marketwatch.com]

                  And those alleged 180 billions are offshore and couldn't be used in the USA without paying a huge chunk in taxes. (And just for comparison, at the time of the buyout, Dell had 2x more money on US soil than Apple currently has - that's what happens when you don't throw money out the window to feed your ego).

                  Furhermore, even if we're talking about just those 16 billions Apple has, it's not *their* money, that's the sharehol

                  • The rumor is that this building was built with the offshore money. The concrete panels were bought in Germany and shipped to SV. Most of the building materials came from overseas, so buying them there and shipping them avoids repatriating the money.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      This is the biggest fucking waste of money I've ever seen, outside of the federal government.

      • More people use google every day (or have an iphone) than have ever set foot on US soil.

        These companies are involved in every part of our lives, and a single descision of their headquarters has implications *worldwide* and depending on how fast its enrolled *the next day*.

        They do have this major influence, and they actually use it. Facebook is manipulating news stories. Google is lobbying for TPP.

        These tech giants *are* governments. They get their own exceptions from the US government to get foreign workers

      • $5,000,000,000 you say?

        To put that in perspective that's more than the GDP of Barbados!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It is a gigantic waste of shareholder money. I have to believe that they could have built a normal office complex for somewhere around $500 million, leaving $4.5 billion left for shareholders.

      The 5.477 billion outstanding Apple shares means that the remaining $4.5 billion could have been used to fund an 80-cent-per-share dividend. If I owned a sizable fraction of Apple stock I'd be seriously thinking about an activist shareholder lawsuit right about now.

      • It is a gigantic waste of shareholder money...$4.5 billion could have been used to fund an 80-cent-per-share dividend

        Think of it as a clever tax dodge. Apple has made a lot of money overseas that they would like to bring back home, but if it were brought back home as money they'd have to pay a 35% US corporate income tax on it. So instead they spend their profits on expensive one-of-a-kind glass panels and concrete slabs fabricated outside the US then shipped and used here.

        And sure, those glass panels

  • Destruction leads to creation, that leads to the cycle beginning again... It will be fun to see where Apple goes in the future.

  • They didn't answer the most important question... (Score:4, Funny)

    by codeButcher ( 223668 ) on Saturday June 11, 2016 @07:08AM (#52294359)
    Does it have rounded corners? And are they patented?

  • The Spaceship? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The Spaceship, as many have nicknamed it

    Who calls it that? I've always called it the glass doughnut.

  • Isn't it amazing what a company can do when they have way too much money and no idea what to do with it?

  • Campus ? Its an office (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    camÂpus/'kamp?s/
    noun
            the grounds and buildings of a university or college.

    this is called an "office" or "company headquarters", pretty, but it certainly isnt a university or school so why call it a word that means exactly that ?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It's called a campus because of the re-education it takes to join the cult properly.

  • From a 1 mile sq ring even at peak output that seems like they are using very expensive panels.

    • Well, if we assume a 750' outside diamater and a 550' inside diameter, the roof area should be around 817k square feet, or 76,000 square meters.

      If we assume solar insolance at 1,000 watts per square meter at peak sun (probably too high, but likely what they used) that's 76,000,000 peak watts total.

      If the panels are 15% efficient, that means at peak they should put out around 11.4 MW.

      Since I doubt the entire roof area is completely covered due to the requirements of other building systems, and the f

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by f00zbll ( 526151 )
        there's additional panels on the garage and other structures, so the calculation is missing a couple thousand sq meters. I haven't done the math, so I don't actually know what the projected output is.

        • then you have to remove the area of the skylight glass panels etc also mentioned. All the numbers are made up or wildly exaggerated.

          As mentioned above, there are also 9 story tall doors in a 7 story building, 100 pound concrete slabs, ...

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by fnj ( 64210 )

      Yeah, 16 milliwatts sounds a mite wimpy.

  • Stupid idea (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Are they going to have a train or something to move people around more quickly than they can walk?

    Tall buildings have elevators to do this.

    I may be wrong but I suspect there will be a lot of time wasted by people having to regularly walk long distances to meetings.

    • I may be wrong but I suspect there will be a lot of time wasted by people having to regularly walk long distances to meetings.

      At a circumference of a mile, the radius is one mile divided by 2 pi.

      So about 840 feet, or just over 250 meters.

      Even if you double that for the longest distance, the diameter, you are likely not moving more that 1680 feet, or under a third of a mile. Or 500 meters/half a kilometer if you walk metrically.

      The big hint is that there's more than one door inside the circle.

      In terms of routing, it's using the same trick as the Cray 1 used to get shortest point-to-point signal paths.

      P.S.: Most time spent walking

    • How does one get from one side of the doughnut to the other without lots of walking? Seems to provide a very inefficient means of traveling within the complex with all of the dead space in the middle unless I'm missing something.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rl117 ( 110595 )

        I would hope it has a fast monorail system. All the lairs of evil supervillains should have one.

      • You can walk across that 'dead' space in the center. Even better, you arrange the office space such that employees won't typically have a need to make such travels.

        As an aside, the pentagon has some interesting similarities - circular design, five floors, roughly one mile in circumference. It seems to work OK.

        • The Pentagon has people movers inside it.

          http://www.history.com/news/9-... [history.com]

          They are scooters that can move someone at 3 mph if they aren't physically fit enough to walk the distances needed.

          • Apple will no doubt be beta testing a fleet of its new iMovers (featuring a simplified, single point drive - picture the offspring from a three way tryst involving a Segway, a "hover board", and a Dysan Ball vac).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Macrat ( 638047 )

      Are they going to have a train or something to move people around more quickly than they can walk?

      Apple is currently spread out in buildings all over Cupertino, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara.

      Walking this is a hell of a lot easier than driving/shuttle to a building in another city.

  • For those complaining about cost... if you watched the video, you'll see that the concrete slabs are being shipped from Germany.

    It's a clever way to "repatriate" a bunch of money by buying concrete and shipping with it, without the money ever landing in the U.S. tax system, don't you think?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Agripa ( 139780 )

      It is too bad that they could not prefabricate the whole thing in Germany and ship it in.

    • The interesting thing is: why is it cheaper for a so called "first world nation" to import something as simple as concrete slabs from all over the Atlantic? Considering high prices, high wages, high taxes in Germany?

      However when I see what prices the US citizens pay for a solar panel on the roof ... an what parts make the costs, like labour (which we europeans always think is super cheap in the US) and inverters (which seem to cost twice as much over at your place than here, or was it three times as much?)

      Y

  • As someone who's occupied a number of dank, crappy offices, my condolences to those who get to report to work in the awesomest building on the planet....then slip beneath the earth's surface to their dank, windowless, crappy offices.

    • my condolences to those who get to report to work in the awesomest building on the planet....then slip beneath the earth's surface to their dank, windowless, crappy offices.

      The original plans were to have two below ground basement levels...but they are for underground parking. I'm not sure whether the claim of there being three floors now means they added another such level or the reporter is confused.

      Here is the original blueprint [cupertino.org] which clearly shows Basement 1 and Basement 2 as levels containing 230

  • http://phys.org/news/2012-04-n... [phys.org]
    http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/ici... [imperial.ac.uk]

    At least at $5B I hope that they are building something like the worlds most advanced light source for a new type of fab. It would be an incredibly stupid waste of money to spend that on a pretty building.

  • Meh, I'll take my work headquarters, my home office, over theirs any day. Nothing beats the 15 sec commute, clothing optional, my own boss basically, no one dropping in for a quick chat (except the wife and maybe a quickie) work environment. I know everyone can't do that or have jobs amiable to that but I personally can't go back.

  • curved glass planes

    I suppose they only look curved [google.com] due to the RDF.

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