Apple's MacBook Air-like Store Roof Wasn't Designed To Handle Snow... in Chicago (9to5mac.com) 190
An anonymous reader shares a report Apple opened its new flagship retail store in Chicago earlier this year to much acclaim, but as the weather turns from fall to winter, a design oversight is causing some problems. As reported by Chicago blog Spundart, Apple seemingly didn't design the MacBook Air-like roof of the store to account for snow... in Chicago. Apple's newest Chicago store garnered earlier attention for its roof design that mimics a MacBook Air, but one clear oversight is that there are no gutters to catch snow or ice. Furthermore, as the multi-level store sits along the Chicago River, the roof is sloped downward, meaning that anyone standing on the walkway along the river gets hit with falling snow and ice. Further reading: Apple is really bad at design.
stop blaming Apple (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously you're holding the building wrong.
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They're just being brave. You should too suck it up and just walk under the roof, what's the worst that could happen. You'll see they were right all along!
Re:stop blaming Apple (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously you're holding the building wrong.
The funny thing is, if you look under the article, about half the commenters are essentially saying that.
"Lots of buildings in Chicago have roped-off sidewalks in the winter. This is no big deal! Apple can still do no wrong! The astronomical prices I paid for their gear is still justified!"
Re:stop blaming Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of buildings in Chicago have roped-off sidewalks in the winter.
Why isn't this a valid point? If roping off the hazardous portion of the sidewalk is an accepted solution, what is the problem here?
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Because it usually applies to ancient buildings that crumble from the weight of decades and haven't seen any kind of renovation or refurbishment in about the same time. Not brand new ones that were built the same damn year.
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ancient buildings
Do you have a source for this or are you just spitballing? On occasion they have the close the brand new shiny PATH entrance below the brand new shiny Freedom Tower in NYC for falling ice, so I'm skeptical of your claim.
Re: stop blaming Apple (Score:2)
You're comparing the freedom tower to an apple store?
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Just keep moving the bar.
Re: stop blaming Apple (Score:2)
No one is moving any bars; you need to look up the word "usually".
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Yeah, reading up on it you are still full of shit. "Usually" doesn't apply here. Modern buildings dominate the list. [citylab.com]
Re: stop blaming Apple (Score:2)
lol. Yeah, a handful of anecdotes are absolutely the same as an exhaustive list.
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Tell you what, get back to me with your exhaustive list that shows "usually" being appropriate and I'll declare you right. Doubt it's worth the effort, but have at it. For now, I'm the only one to do any research at all.
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Last I checked Chicago has an average of two deaths/year from falling ice.
Icicles on cornices are unavoidable to some extent, heated wires in gutters etc only do so much. Designing your roof to side off snow, right onto a sidewalk is not unavoidable.
The trick would be to do it on schedule, so the cleanup crew is standing by and the area is safe. Best would be to get it to slide with a simple long handled snow rake, high pitch roof style. But that ship sailed.
Spray the roof with 'Pam' in fall Find a
Re:stop blaming Apple (Score:5, Informative)
Why isn't this a valid point?
Because it's not really true.
Many high-rise buildings in Chicago put up warning signs, typically in warmer weather when snow is more likely to melt, refreeze, and fall. For older buildings this is usually because of snow on window ledges and for newer buildings it is usually when snow sticks to the vertical surfaces like windows.
Only rarely are sidewalks roped off, especially for single-story buildings like the Apple store - I haven't seen any roped off yet this season. Newer buildings have ways of containing/melting snow before it falls from sloping surfaces, like snow melt systems.
The article keeps stalking bout gutters like they would help. They would actually make it worse for snow & ice, unless it included snow melting. What you often see on sloping roofs are protrusions [wikipedia.org] that help hold the snow pack and break it up when it eventually melts and flows down. But that wouldn't be slick enough for Apple.
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Hatorade Distortion Field.
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'Course you do.
You mean people who don't actually exist? Y'all Hatebois are like Birchers, ranting about how the United States is being overrun with communists when they've never been within a thousand miles of one.
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This is no big deal! Apple can still do no wrong! The astronomical prices I paid for their gear is still justified!
The thing that irritated me about people like this is they're convincing Apple that it's OK to fuck up Macs.
E.g. I've got a 2012 Macbook Pro. When it got slow I added more Ram and an SSD and it was fast again. Now all Macbook Pros have soldered Ram and SSD which means I need to max out both when I buy them and Apple charge way over the odds for that. So I'm probably going back to Windows.
However if Apple listens to the fanboy chorus on the Verge and BGR they'll conclude that doing this is fine, and Macbook
HEY EVERYBODY... (Score:1)
Hey everybody, look at all the crybabies whining about Apple. Never mind that it doesn't actually affect anyone here, and the building design probably isn't Apple's fault. Slashdot readers just want something to whine about and get butthurt about, so the crybabies are out in force.
Re:HEY EVERYBODY... (Score:5, Informative)
The building design was pretty clearly intended to resemble a MacBook lid, and there's around a 0% chance that it was a coincidence.
It's ALWAYS the archietect's fault (Score:2)
That's why they are paid well. They should have ensured this issue was addressed in the design somehow.
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Re:HEY EVERYBODY... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's also 0% chance that Apple just casually designed the building and it was not signed off on by architects, engineers, the city / state building inspectors and planning commissions, and thus met all requirements for handling snow and ice. My guess is the pitch of the roof was such that it did not require snow guards, but in reality it needs them.
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No, of course it's not Apple's fault, they certainly didn't design this but bought it second hand...
This rooftop is a great symbol of what's wrong with Apple altogether: Design and form trump function. To the point where function is not even secondary anymore, it's negligible. An afterthought. But never something that may dare to get into the way of looks and making a fashion statement.
Face it, Apple products have become fashion products and technology is treated like some kind of necessary evil.
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And this in the city where the saying "form follows function" was coined by Louis Sullivan.
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Never mind that it doesn't actually affect anyone here
That seems like a pretty bold assumption to say that there are no Slashdot readers that live in, work in, or visit Chicago.
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They were assuming that the reality distortion field would sweep away the snow.
No no no, its the snows fault (Score:5, Funny)
It's holding onto the roof wrong.
Designed by Apple in California (Score:2)
Apple's newest Chicago store garnered earlier attention for its roof design that mimics a MacBook Air, but one clear oversight is that there are no gutters to catch snow or ice. Furthermore, as the multi-level store sits along the Chicago River, the roof is sloped downward, meaning that anyone standing on the walkway along the river gets hit with falling snow and ice.
Designed by Apple in California ;-)
Possibly MUCH more serious problem... (Score:4, Insightful)
If they really completely forgot about snow and ice they have a much more serious problem.
What about the WEIGHT of the snow and ice on the cantilevered roof with just the glass to support it?
I looked at the picture and couldn't tell how far it was extended out from the central supports but if there's a lot of snow on top that then catches rain and sleet to become a heavy thick blanket of ice, I would imagine there could be some structural issues (if it even flexes a little maybe it would cause the glass to shatter).
Any structural engineers who know this kind of construction and can shed some light on this issue?
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perhaps it's heated to simply melt the snow off?
(unlikely, I know).
Also, who said the lack of gutters was a design oversight? I think it just shows the normal contempt for users that Apple has always shown.
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Re:Possibly MUCH more serious problem... (Score:4, Informative)
Ice dams are for snow. Gutters are for water. It would be very odd if Chicago did t require roof drainage, so I would assume there is a concealed gutter in the overhang. It just doesn’t do anything for the snow build-up.
Apple retail stores are badly designed as functional buildings. Why should this one be any different! Let’s hope they also found a way to make the winter winds worse as well!
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As long as it's still freezing, gutters don't do much for catching snow. And if it's cold enough for icicles, it's probably cold enough for water to freeze in the drain pipe.
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In places like Chicago, Albany, Boston, you typically put a thermostatically controlled antifreeze heater wire in you gutters.
Ice dams are bad, destroy roofs, somewhat unavoidable, but size must be controlled. Icicles can and do kill people off three story buildings.
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There are two issues here. If snow on the roof could cause the glass to shatter then the structural engineer should not have approved the design and the city engineers should not have given them a permit to build the structure (at least not without a plan of how they will remove the snow on the roof if it builds up too much.) If these engineers didn't think of this then they should both have their licenses revoked.
It is up to the architect to figure out how useable the building will be. It sounds like the b
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They had their Software Engineers do it. Because all Engineers are interchangeable, right?
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Looking at the picture its rather not the issue. The roof is slightly sloped and not that large, so the snow just slides to the sides... and falls directly on the passing people below.
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I'm not an structural engineer, but I can tell you exactly what went wrong.
Apple did what Apple always does and puts the design before the function. The designers told the engineers what it had to look like and the engineers were told to shut up and do their jobs. They probably went through a fair few engineers as they're not known for their ability to shut up and do something they think is wrong.
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Not a design issue (Score:1)
It looks pretty. Maybe an engineering problem.
But it sounds like the roof works fine, and the complaints are it's inconvenient for people who aren't in the Apple store.....
there are no gutters to catch snow or ice. Furthermore, as the multi-level store sits along the Chicago River, the roof is sloped downward, meaning that anyone standing on the walkway along the river gets hit with falling snow and ice.
Uhm.... like the falling snow and ice that is all over the place, when it is snowing? Maybe look
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It looks like the "solution" is a practical one - rope off the area directly under the falling ice. From the picture in TFA, it looks like this means roping off roughly half of the maybe 40 foot wide staircase, which itself is probably not so popular in the snow and ice. I like to laugh at stupidity as much as the next guy, but I'm not feeling it here. They sometimes close certain subway entrances in NYC because of falling ice - I imagine something similar happens in Chicago.
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From the picture in TFA, it looks like this means roping off roughly half of the maybe 40 foot wide staircase, which itself is probably not so popular in the snow and ice.
Are you kidding, or have you just never lived in a cold area before? You still have to use stairways in snow and cold, if the ice is actually a problem you just use the railings as well. Those are typically installed at the edges of the staircase, but with the roped off area you can't use half the railings on those stairs now (in fact that stairway is poorly design, it's wide enough that there should be a railing in the middle as well, but that's probably a separate issue).
From the picture they've also comp
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Are you kidding, or have you just never lived in a cold area before?
I'm not kidding, and the reason I recognize that area as being relatively unpopular and the loss of half the stairway as insignificant is because I've lived only in cold areas.
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Why is it not OK? (Score:2)
So disabling half of the staircase is okay with you?
When the staircase is 40ft wide, why does it matter if only 20 feet of it are open... that sounds like a design win to me (even if inadvertent).
I mean, have you measured the stairways in your own home or building or asylum?
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So disabling half of the staircase is okay with you?
Well, yeah. Why wouldn't it be?
Re:Not a design issue (Score:4, Insightful)
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The VERY COMPLAINT about Apple's roof is that it doesn't retain the snow, because of no gutters and the way it's sloped.
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Ever see a slate roof with those spikes in the roof over the doorways? That is so the ice/snow doesn't slide down all at once and kill someone. Would be quite an oversight if modern building codes didn't require prevention of this sort of thing. Whoever reviewed and approved of such a roof in Chicago should be fired. Due to safety risk the building should be closed until the problem is mediated.
Just looked at the article and saw the pic of this building, LOL that's just a hilarious design. How do they pass
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Two-feet thick glass walls?
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i always thought was to discourage pigeons from roosting, and then shitting on people as they walk in (though roughly the same idea?)
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Whoever reviewed and approved of such a roof in Chicago should be fired. Due to safety risk the building should be closed until the problem is mediated.
It's not really a safety issue in itself that they don't have gutters; more of a convenience for customers not getting caught up in a bit of snow sliding off the roof.
Adding gutters "to divert snow" can increase hazard: as dangerous icicles tend to form under gutters, and the icicles are essentially frozen missiles that can fall with force.
Also, if
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That's great and all but I never mentioned gutters. My point was that allowing a possible giant sheet of ice to slide down and kill someone is a safety issue and should be addressed. Possibly with those spikes that retain snow from sliding off in one big sheet.
Just because ropes are common doesn't make it right. Especially since this is a brand new building that in theory should not be allowed to be built with this type of design flaw regarding public safety.
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No, like sheets of snow and ice that form on the roof and then slide down the slope when rising temperatures cause some melting, resulting in large chunks of ice and snow pelting passersby at high velocity.
Re:Not a design issue (Score:4, Insightful)
The roof works fine, it's the damn snow that's the problem.
Maybe write into the specs that the roof cannot be used to keep snow away. While you're at it, just to be safe, write it for water in general. Or hail. Or anything else that might fall from the sky.
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It looks pretty. Maybe an engineering problem.
But it sounds like the roof works fine, and the complaints are it's inconvenient for people who aren't in the Apple store.....
Sounds like another marketing/sales ploy just like their CPU slowing tactic. Don't want to get hit by falling snow/ice? Come inside and buy something!
They'll just release an update... (Score:4, Funny)
...that intentionally slows down the snow and ice after one year.
Roof works fine (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is people are pedestrianing all wrong.
Architecture (Score:3, Interesting)
I was unaware that Apple was an architectural firm.
Public Throughfare? (Score:1)
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The space that is roped off is run by the company which owns the plaza. The stairs are slippery from the falling ice and snow, so they roped them off because they don't want to get their asses sued off.
I used to work for apple... (Score:4, Interesting)
...and one thing that sticks out in memory is in some of their stores, they had opted to build things against code and safety guidelines and just pay the fines as long as it wouldn't shut down the stores.
The company got in trouble regularly because of things like people hurting themselves by walking into glass doors that are hard to see without appropriate markers and whatnot.
They didn't give a fuck.
Re:I used to work for apple... (Score:4, Insightful)
Or have vision problems... which was the case.
A great thing to not care about for a company that "cares about inclusivity".
Typical Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
That's Apple nowadays: all form over function.
Re: Typical Apple (Score:2)
Was thinking the same thing,
Form over function, not such a big deal with laptops, Uhm, with architecture, not so much!
I think Scott Adams predicted (Score:2)
Beautiful Slippery Brittle
Exactly what you want in your cell phone
It's California (Score:3)
I'm going to blame California, not Apple, for this one. I had a relative who worked in the Metropolitan Transit Commission here in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. When putting in light rail, they got a consultant from California, who absolutely insisted that all you needed for bus and train shelters was a roof, no walls. That is not a good idea in a Minnesota winter.
So much blame, but not for Apple... (Score:3, Informative)
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Are you suggesting that when you hire experts to do something and they mess up it's your fault? So, if you hire an electrician to rewire your house and your house burns down because he did a poor job, you wouldn't go after the electrician, right? You'd say it was all your fault for hiring a bad electrician and take responsibility for burning your house down? So contractors can do whatever they want, and inspectors can approve whatever they want, and then it's all the building owners fault for not becoming a
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Are you suggesting that responsibility is a zero-sum game and can't be shared?
So, if I hire an electrician from London to wire my house because I think his work looks pretty, and he uses the wrong voltage because he doesn't have basic knowledge about how wiring works in my geographic region, and my house burns down, I bear no responsibility whatsoever for making a poor choice based on questionable reasoning?
So, you enjoy fucking pigs? I mean, we're writing sentences that start with "So" and end with questi
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You can't hire an electrician from London that isn't licensed to work here to wire your house and still get it approved. Just like Apple couldn't have hired some dick off the street to design their building and still get it signed off on. The whole reason these people get licensed is to demonstrate that you can trust them with this stuff. Is your entire argument based on the assumption that Apple hired unlicensed idiots to design their building? Or were you completely unaware of how any of that works? Becau
This is pretty common in Downtown Chicago (Score:5, Informative)
I work in Downtown Chicago.
First, we haven't really had snow yet. And by that, I mean we haven't had a good snowfall over 15" in one go, or our 36" annual snowfall, or our 89.7" record snowfall. I thought this would be a story about the roof handling the weight of snow. I'm guessing professionals that know Chicago had that in mind.
Second, snow accumulates on exterior building walls, melts, freezes to ice, and falls off. Pretty much all of Downtown Chicago in winter is orange cones and signs saying "Danger–Falling Ice".
So this is nothing unusual. Well, except it's Apple. That's the only thing that makes the story interesting at all.
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So this is nothing unusual. Well, except it's Apple. That's the only thing that makes the story interesting at all.
So you're saying that in Chicago it is a common design feature of building roofs to channel falling ice and snow onto pedestrian walkways?
Because that's exactly what Apple did, they expressly built something that didn't comply with building codes to make it look like one of their products, we now see why these codes (namely the requirement to have gutters) are in place. If it were any other company they'd be backpedalling this fast, but because it's Apple and you know, Apple are special and the rules do
Feature (Score:3)
Its not a bug, its a feature!
Maybe hire an architect who lives there? (Score:3)
My first thought when Apple announced it was putting a big glass building in Scottsdale, Arizona was "Welp, that idea came from somebody who doesn't live in Scottsdale, Arizona."
Apparently the "architect who is obviously from out of town" problem is not unique to that store.
Not a mistake (Score:2)
Inspired by the famed architect I. M. Pei, itâ(TM)s Appleâ(TM)s latest product - the iMpale.
Apple is not alone (Score:2)
Falling ice is a common issue in the Chicago loop when weather starts to warm and ice on buildings starts to melt and fall off. Just google "chicago killed falling ice" to get an idea of how often this happens.
Not a new problem (Score:3)
Many years ago (1990s) I took a guided trip round Chicago and one of the things was a building with that was square or rectangular section with a sloping roof at such an angle that it was a diamond shape.
Maybe this one? https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]
The guide said the angle was almost perfectly wrong - just flat enough that snow would build up ... until all of a sudden it wouldn't and there'd be an avalanche.
The solution, IIRC, was auxiliary heaters.
Roof collapse (Score:1)
At first glance I thought TFA hinted at a failure of the roof under snow load. That would have been something.
Snow, sure, but what about rain? (Score:3)
Looking at the photo, it sure looks like an oversight on snow and ice given the apparent certainty of sheets of it falling off at some point. Other posters have remarked that for Chicago, cordoning off sections of the sidewalk around certain buildings is no unusual for winter. It's apparently standard practice there to deal with snow and ice.
But what about rain? There are apparently no gutters or diversions for rain, either. We don't get to see the main entrance to understand if the architects had made allowances to walk in and out of the building safely with regard to falling snow or ice, but what about rain? Does the entire roof drain off the edges to form standing sheets of cascading water during even light rainfall? It would be an embarrassing design defect if your customers were nearly guaranteed to be pelted with precipitation during inclement weather both on entry and exit of the structure.
But for those of us not in Chicago, all we have to go on is one photo, and a blog entry. Perhaps someone who is actually there could help clarify the situation.
Apple (Score:3)
I have to say... I haven't yet seen a single Apple design feature that I actually like. Apple aren't "design". They're "designer". That is, they're all mouth, charge big money, for something basic or impractical or just stupid.
Design is about function just as much as it is about aesthetics and I can't find a single Apple feature, gadget, hardware or accessory that... well, functions better than anything else. Sometimes it's even hard to point out something *satisfactory*. Even the boxes things are packaged in drive me mad (who in their right mind makes a trapezoidal box for a large expensive flat item that only tessellates if you turn half of them upside-down?)
And, yes, I manage hundreds of Apple devices as part of my job (not my choice, I made the disclaimer when I took them over that I thought it was a big mistake of theirs, they realised it themselves within a matter of a year and are now backpedalling and moving AWAY from everything Apple).
Honestly, I can't find a single feature on an Apple device -
software or hardware - that I thought "that's pretty cool" when I first saw it. Nothing. Power buttons are un-feelable and yet on the rear of the devices, the stupid keyboards, the horrible mice, the packaging, the cabling, the layout for phone and tablet screens, no batteries, no expansion capability, everything about them just annoys me.
Even their "design" book where they show off Apple design? It's a white cover with a white spine with white writing on it so you can't read what it is when it's sitting on a bookshelf in normal lighting.
They are "designer", not "design", which means you're paying through the nose for shite, rather than have moments of "wow, look at that, isn't that cool how that pulls out, works, joins to this, has been put together, etc. and still works really well".
Not really Apple's fault (Score:2)
I love to pick on Apple as much as the next guy, but this is really an oversight from the civil engineering firm they hired to design it for them. The owner can have as much input as they want, and tell the architect what they'd like, but ultimately, the engineers are supposed to do a feasibility analysis that takes into account foreseeable conditions. They definitely have to design for snow loads for one, and if you have funny shapes, you should be aware that snow will accumulate differently than on a flat
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Despite the idea of corruption which Chicago is popular for. I expect Apples design was a bit too different for the engineers to really evaluate.
The biggest thing I see is Apple Stores design, is a very California type of design. However up in the Great Lakes area, we need a different style of buildings.
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I expect Apples design was a bit too different for the engineers to really evaluate.
What is hard to evaluate about flat, slick, unobstructed?
Re:City engineers should have caught this (Score:5, Insightful)
The stamps of the licensed architects & engineers are a surrogate for actually understanding and vetting the design. The plan reviewers and inspectors only look for specific code issues. Actually, it would be an impossible burden for them to thoroughly review all aspects of every building design, unless you had more inspectors and plan reviewers that you have architects & engineers submitting plans, and required mountains of additional paperwork from the architects & engineers.
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I completely agree. It's whoever Apple hired to designed who are at fault for this.
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Probably not the city engineers. It's not their job to catch usability issues, only safety issues, as related to applicable codes. But Apple did NOT design the building themselves. They hired a consulting engineering firm to do it for them. Those guys should have paid attention to it.
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I'm not laughing at them, I'm laughing with them.
I'm laughing at their customers, though.
Re:Not upgradable (Score:5, Funny)
Build early, build often?
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Same logic as with their products. Buy early, buy often...
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It's not about me, genius. This story posting is simply dumb — someone complained about a building — who fucking cares? We need less crap like this.
Please stop letting haters lead the conversation.
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Just tired of all types of haters making the world worse for everyone. Why does Slashdot cater to them?
Re: Most buildings in Chicago drop ice... (Score:2)