Apple's New Spaceship Campus Gets a Name, Lifts Off In April (arstechnica.com) 106
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple has been building its giant new "spaceship" campus in the company's hometown of Cupertino, California, since December of 2013, and since then fans have paid obsessive attention to the structure. It gets buzzed by drones constantly, and the most popular YouTube videos of the building in progress have amassed well over half-a-million views apiece. The company announced today that the campus will be open to employees starting in April and that the building and environs now have a name: Apple Park. Apple says that moving the 12,000 employees who will work at the campus will take more than six months, and landscaping and construction on some buildings won't be done until the summer. The new campus mostly replaces the university-style Infinite Loop campus Apple has used since 1993, though Apple has said that it will also be keeping the older buildings. The new campus' cost has been estimated at around $5 billion. Apple will also be naming one space on the new campus after its founder and former CEO -- the Steve Jobs Theater will replace the current Town Hall event space that Apple sometimes uses for company meetings and product announcements, and it will open "later this year." The new space will be much larger (it will seat 1,000, compared to roughly 300 for the Town Hall), and the larger space will presumably allow Apple to launch more of its products on its campus rather than having to rent expensive event space in downtown San Francisco. The company is also moving its Worldwide Developers Conference closer to home this year -- it will return to San Jose after many years at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
Not a Spaceship (Score:4, Funny)
I have said it before: the ring is a massive Reality Distortion Field Generator.
Apple needs it more than ever, now that Jobs has been dead for five years.
Apple once again late with a product (Score:4, Insightful)
I have said it before: the ring is a massive Reality Distortion Field Generator.
As per usual Apple is late to market with an inferior product.
Apple Haters have been carrying around a small portable reality distortion generators with them for years that allows them to see Apple's growth as retraction. They appear to have a boundless power source and are so strong no reality is able to break through no matter how discordant the internal view becomes!
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My burn was pretty good but I don't think Apple Haters are capable of any emotions besides burning, raw hatred - pretty sure he (yes all Apple Haters are He) is not sad.
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Best part about being dead is you don't need his permission.
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I have said it before: the ring is a massive Reality Distortion Field Generator.
As per usual Apple is late to market with an inferior product.
Apple Haters have been carrying around a small portable reality distortion generators with them for years that allows them to see Apple's growth as retraction. They appear to have a boundless power source and are so strong no reality is able to break through no matter how discordant the internal view becomes!
So when did YOU turn into an Apple Hater?
And yes, as with most large-scale construction. Projects, this one is a little late; but INFERIOR?!? Relative to WHAT? The Large Hadron Collider???
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Not inferior, but perhaps a modern equivalent to the Spruce Goose.
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Not inferior, but perhaps a modern equivalent to the Spruce Goose.
I don't see the analogy.
The Spruce Goose was a technologically-unsound (but it DID fly!) airplane that Howard Huge built as a testament to his ego. It was never really intended to be practical in a commercial sense.
But when all is said and done, Apple Park is simply an office complex that employs a somewhat unconventional design for its main building (but no more so than many other unconventional-looking buildings around the world), deploying completely off-the-shelf technology for its power-source; but
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I have said it before: the ring is a massive Reality Distortion Field Generator.
Apple needs it more than ever, now that Jobs has been dead for five years.
Actually, you're wrong... on both counts. You see, it's actually a giant Stargate so that Jobs can return from his last super secret project, to build the iShip which is in fact a spaceship. Word is the controls are flat panels and there are zero buttons. There have been some issues with the controls exploding if the ship is damaged but that's the users fault for flying it wrong.
am disappoint (Score:2)
ELO, Boston, Kansas and Journey did it better, stardust.
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It hardly looks anything like an 80's rock album cover. ELO, Boston, Kansas and Journey did it better, stardust.
That's because all they had to do was a 12 inch airbrush painting.
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I wondered why big posters of them were so blurry. Clearly it's because they'd been enlarde by a factor of 2 or 3..
It also explains why the posters became even worse after CDs came out.
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I wondered why big posters of them were so blurry. Clearly it's because they'd been enlarde by a factor of 2 or 3..
It also explains why the posters became even worse after CDs came out.
And who knows if they even went back to the original artwork and optically-enlarged them? That would have been the best way to preserve any detail...
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I have said it before: the ring is a massive Reality Distortion Field Generator.
Apple needs it more than ever, now that Jobs has been dead for five years.
I thought it was Job's mausoleum?
sign of decline (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:sign of decline (Score:5, Informative)
yeah, that $200 BILLION or whatever apple has stashed around the world these days is going to vanish next week and apple will go bankrupt
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Well, I'm sure the dozens of billions of unpaid back taxes will be up for debate shortly.
Naming it after a south korean? (Score:2)
Which member of the Park family, is Apple?
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I don't know. Is it a better or a worse sign than spreading many thousands of employees around decrepit buildings which may or may not have costly leases and cause inefficiencies in the workplace?
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Sometimes. Apple already has their 1 Infinite Loop building and then most of the office buildings nearby along De Anza and a few nearer the middle of town. They're pretty short on space. It makes sense for them to be building a new big building, and the cost difference between building a new boring building and a new shiny building is pretty small. This will let them move a bunch of people who need to collaborate into offices near each other, rather than having them spread across the various De Anza bui
No. (Score:2)
Isn't sinking 100s of millions into construction of a new corporate headquarters one the Fucked Company(tm) 6 common signs that a company is about to implode?
No.
Not if those 5 Billion come from the 240 billion in cash that you have accumulated in earnings but selling product with revenues up to north of 30% (iPhone raw earnings are between 200$ and 250$ per device. Which is why Huawei, Google and Co. cry themselves to sleep at night.). Then 5 Billion for an attempt to build the worlds best office building i
You all laugh now (Score:5, Funny)
When the coming zombie hordes simply slide off the smooth exterior of the walls or flow around it like a pebble in a stream, you will be begging to be let inside the true sanctuary city Jobs has built.
Guess who will be sad *they* didn't spend $40 on IAP that year...
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I always wondered why a slope with an incline that gradually increased to vertical wasn't ever employed in zombie fiction forts. They would shamble forward until their center of mass shifted and then fall back.
With the right slope contour, you could make it so they fell back pretty far.
Another option would be a kind of blind curve, where they shamble in and then just shamble away on the other side.
Interesting to mull over effect of shapes. (Score:3)
I was also mulling this over in relation to the movie World War Z where (spoiler) zombies piled up against a wall until they got over the top...
Even against an angled wall that would work after a while I imagine, as you packed in enough tipped over zombies. But against curved and angled wall it seems like it would take much longer to work as most of the mindlessly piling on zombies would slide to the sides, or possibly even the force of new incoming zombies pushing the zombies up against the surface of the
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You can't really compete with the concept of WWZ zombies -- they're just too fast and aggressive, but I think nearly every other invocation of them would fall away from an elliptical wall.
The other low-tech zombie fighting tool I've always wanted to see employed is a good old demining flail. These look like tanks with a combine attached on front, only the combine part is steel weights the size of melons attached to chains. They rotate and pound the ground to set off any mines.
https://youtu.be/wf6CsvAffHo? [youtu.be]
doesn't perceive that big (Score:4, Insightful)
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Seems huge to me when I drive by. Easy to spot from a plane too. But I can't compare to Pentagon or DoD.
Maybe wait for the walls to be removed ...
It should be named "Mos Eisley Spaceport" (Score:1)
"You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy."
You're thinking of elsewhere (Score:3)
You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
No, Apple is not located anywhere near downtown San Francisco.
Call it "Spaceship" - No Need to Pay Taxes... (Score:1)
Brilliant. It's not part of any country, I guess, so no tax money gonna be paid anywhere.
Terrible Name (Score:5, Informative)
They should change it to something better, like "Very Little Gravitas Indeed".
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Re: Terrible Name (Score:2)
Isn't an apple park usually called an orchard?
This is garbage (Score:2)
name change? (Score:2)
R&D (Score:5, Interesting)
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It doesn't take a lot of facilities and equipment to delete parts from the assembly.
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I see the didn't have the courage to remove the doors. Doesn't bode well.
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Why doesn't it bode well? They are building miniature electronics, not airliners. What do you think an R&D team needs? Wind tunnels to check the corners of the iPhone have the correct roundness?
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Why doesn't it bode well? They are building miniature electronics, not airliners. What do you think an R&D team needs? Wind tunnels to check the corners of the iPhone have the correct roundness?
How much physical room does it take to do any of the other things that happen at HQ?
Other than symbolizing the relative insignificance of Apples investment in R&D, this albatross is a monument to the failure of the internet to do, well, anything other than mimic TV and landline.
You need to do some fact checking before you spew your hate.
Apple spends serious coin on Research and Development; far more than their competition.
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Apple spends serious coin on Research and Development; far more than their competition.
This is almost true, though the vast majority of Apple's R&D funding is firmly at the D end of the spectrum. IBM used to spend a lot more than Apple on research, though they've cut down a lot. Microsoft still does (around $5bn/year on MSR). These companies and Google (and Oracle, and so on) all throw grants at universities for research, which Apple doesn't. It wasn't until last the last few months that Apple even published any of their research.
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Apple spends serious coin on Research and Development; far more than their competition.
This is almost true, though the vast majority of Apple's R&D funding is firmly at the D end of the spectrum. IBM used to spend a lot more than Apple on research, though they've cut down a lot. Microsoft still does (around $5bn/year on MSR). These companies and Google (and Oracle, and so on) all throw grants at universities for research, which Apple doesn't. It wasn't until last the last few months that Apple even published any of their research.
Apple does a lot of Research that isn't directly product-oriented, too; a quick look at their patent portfolio will show that. Just because they don't throw money at universities for tax writeoffs doesn't mean that they don't do pure research themselves.
But if you think that R that is D-oriented doesn't "count", you are nothing but an intellectual effete.
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Apple does a lot of Research that isn't directly product-oriented, too; a quick look at their patent portfolio will show that.
Sorry, no. It may not be tied to products that they're currently shipping, but there's a huge spectrum between initial idea and final product, and Apple has far less investment towards the idea end of the spectrum than any of their major competitors. By the time you can patent something, it's already towards the product end (and have you actually looked at the Apple patent portfolio? They patented a more efficient take-away pizza box, for example, which doesn't really tell you anything about pure researc
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Apple does a lot of Research that isn't directly product-oriented, too; a quick look at their patent portfolio will show that.
Sorry, no. It may not be tied to products that they're currently shipping, but there's a huge spectrum between initial idea and final product, and Apple has far less investment towards the idea end of the spectrum than any of their major competitors. By the time you can patent something, it's already towards the product end (and have you actually looked at the Apple patent portfolio? They patented a more efficient take-away pizza box, for example, which doesn't really tell you anything about pure research spending).
But if you think that R that is D-oriented doesn't "count", you are nothing but an intellectual effete.
It doesn't count because it's playing accounting games. The line between development and product is very blurry. Apple classifies a lot of things are R&D that other companies count as product development. This inflates Apple's R&D spending on the balance sheet, but means that you can't really compare. R&D is a pipeline and things always have to start closer to the pure research end. Most of Apple's R&D is building on pure research done by other organisations. This has changed a bit recently (particularly in machine learning), but they're still a long way behind most other big tech companies on research spending. Microsoft, until they restructured MSR a year or so ago, had the opposite problem: they were spending over $5bn/year on research and turning very little of it into products. Neither extreme is particularly healthy for a company. You need the research end to feed the pipeline, but then you need the pipeline from research to product.
Disclaimer: I work in a university and collaborate with Apple, Google, and Microsoft on several projects.
Everything is fine and dandy until your "Disclaimer", which clearly alludes to the fact that Apple DOES, in fact, grant money to Universities for Research projects.
I just used the handy reference of Apple's Patent Portfolio to point out that Apple does do "pure Research". And they do. You point out the Pizza Box; so f-ing what? That certainly wasn't "Product" oriented (at least not in the sense that Apple would go into the Pizza-Box business), and in fact was about creating a box that had significantly-hi
The donut hole? (Score:3)
The R&D park is the Donut hole.
It's ring shaped because they make no more towers (Score:4, Informative)
More's the pity.
I want a full-sized Mac Pro tower with two ethernet ports, room for at least four drives and PCI cards. The iPad Pro may be great for people who live entirely in Google docs, but not for the rest of us.
Let's search for a name (Score:2)
Its an annular campus. Think, think...
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Its an annular campus. Think, think...
Ringworld.
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Goatse?
Was Orchard trademarked? (Score:2)
Or iOrchard?
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Missed Opportunity... (Score:1)
You'd think a company so focused on marketing could come up with something snappier than "Apple Park".
Hell, even "The Apple Core" would've been better...