Apple opened the doors to the visitor center at Apple Park to the public this morning. And of course, there was a line to get in.
Construction is still being completed on the main campus but you can now get a first-hand view of the campus at the visitors center. The newly opened building looks a lot like a regular Apple store on the inside, except it features some products you can only buy at Apple Park.
The lobby of the Steve Jobs Theater at the new Apple Park campus looks nearly ready to host Apple events. Crews are working around the clock to finish the new Apple headquarters and the entire site is finally starting to come together now that landscaping is almost done.
A new drone video reveals there’s still some work to go on the theater and the main spaceship building, but road striping and landscaping are well underway. The video includes an incredible shot of the theater lit up at night with Apple Park in the background.
Check it out:
Apple’s new campus isn’t move-in ready just yet, but you can take a virtual tour of the company’s new headquarters thanks to a Minecraft player who painstakingly re-created the entire spaceship.
It took over a year for Alex Westerlund to replicate the Apple spaceship campus in Minecraft, with more than 232 hours invested in the virtual building. Without using help or mods, Westerlund claims his Minecraft Apple Campus is 100 percent accurate.
Take a look:
New drone footage of Apple Campus 2 reveals the impressive progress that has been made in recent months. The research and development center and many of the other buildings around the campus are now starting to take shape — and they look glorious in 4K!
We’re excited for the completion of Apple Campus 2, if only to see the amazing, time-lapse clip somebody is sure to cobble together from all of those in-progress drone videos. And the new facilities are so close to completion that the company has already started picking out furniture.
The main building is huge, and it’s going to need a lot of desks and chairs, sure. But it will also include some common areas, and Apple’s ordering up 500 custom-made “Pod Island” tables from Dutch manufacturer Arco to give its employees someplace to hang out, mingle, and collaborate.
And they look really cool.
The world’s largest piece of curved glass is currently being installed at Apple’s fabulous spaceship campus. Over 3,000 gigantic curved glass panes will be used to form the walls on both side of Apple’s four-story campus that will measure more than one mile around.
Apple will use more than six kilometers of curved glass once the project is completed at the end of 2016, so the European Press Agency decided to get a closer look at the monstrous project as it enters its most delicate phase.
Check out the size of these huge glass panes:
A new drone video shows that some of Apple Campus 2’s most impressive features are coming along nicely.
Construction reached the point that builders can start installing windows on both the inside of the giant ring, but that’s not the best thing the camera saw. You can also get a really good look down into Apple’s 1,000-seat, underground auditorium.
Check it out in the video below.
Boasting a 100,000-square-foot fitness center, 11,000 parking spaces, 2,000 bike parking spaces, 2.8 million square feet of office space, and a 100,000-square-foot lab thrown in for good measure, Apple’s “spaceship” Campus 2 is pretty darned massive.
Struggling to wrap your head around that? Then consider that it’s big enough to house pretty much the entirety of Disneyland Park in Anaheim, California. And we’ve got the (mocked-up) photos to prove it.
Steve Jobs was a big believer in great ideas coming from serendipitous interactions. So it’s no surprise that this concept was a central part of the design brief for Apple’s forthcoming “Spaceship” campus — one of the last projects Steve was actively involved with at Apple.
In a new (rare) interview with Phil Schiller, Apple’s Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing talks about the importance of collaboration, and how Apple’s new 13,000-person campus will help further that goal, despite its massive size.
Just when we thought we were getting bored with Apple Campus 2 flyover videos, one has arisen that shows how cool this building is going to be.
If you do a YouTube search for Apple’s future headquarters in Cupertino, you can follow its progress from a huge hole in the ground to something that looks like it might, one day, possibly be a building. But YouTube user Above Reno went 250 miles out of its usual domain to capture some impressive, 4K footage over Labor Day weekend that shows that things are coming along now.
Check out the gorgeous video below.
Apple’s forthcoming $5 billion “spaceship” Apple campus may be designed to squeeze in a massive 13,000 employees, or the equivalent of 35 fully-filled Boeing 747s, but don’t worry: it’s got plenty of space for you, too.
According to Apple’s plans for the new headquarters, the Apple 2 campus will include a glass-walled structure for visitors, boasting a 2,386-square-foot cafe, 10,114-square-foot gift shop, and rooftop viewing space, where visitors can gaze out over Apple’s domain while Tim Cook tells you that everything the light touches is his kingdom.
The biggest city in Silicon Valley is about to land the world’s biggest tech company.
Apple is considering expanding into north San Jose to lease more office space, even though the company’s gigantic space ship campus is scheduled to be completed next year and house more than 13,00 employees.
Apple’s been known for its extreme levels of secrecy since Steve Jobs made his return back in the late 1990s and, while that has changed somewhat under Tim Cook’s stewardship, there are still areas Apple is incredibly careful about revealing. An example? How about its new spaceship-style campus, for one.
According to a recent news report, Apple is insisting on criminal background checks for even the construction workers simply involved with pouring concrete for the new Apple HQ. It’s an unusual move from an unorthodox company, and it’s rubbing a few people up the wrong way.
Tim Cook makes frequent visits to Apple Campus 2 – which is still without an official name. It seems like drone enthusiasts visit the site more than Apple’s CEO. Search YouTube for ‘Apple Campus 2′ and you’ll get over 192,000 results, but this latest video is the best yet.
You can see the top floors of Steve Jobs’ spaceship start to take shape in Dane’s video that was shot on a DJI Inspire 1 drone with built-in 4K video. Dane told Cult of Mac he was in the Bay Area shooting a wedding and decided to get a view of the new campus. He setup in a nearby neighborhood and flew over the site.
Shot by starting off on the other side of the road from Apple Campus 2, the super-high resolution video really captures how massive the new campus will be once it’s finished in 2016.
Watch the full video below:
Thanks to the wonder of drones, we’ve had a few airborne glimpses of Apple’s forthcoming Apple 2 campus in Cupertino. Until now, however, ground-level pictures have been in decidedly short supply.
That changed yesterday, when Apple gave reporters from San Francisco news outlet KQED an up-close-and-personal glimpse at its flying saucer-shaped headquarters, which will eventually house up to 15,000 employees.
Along with photos showing the development, the reporters also heard a few environmentally friendly factoids about the campus — such as the fact that it will use recycled water to flush toilets, solar arrays to meet the majority of energy needs, and that the older buildings Apple inherited when it bought the land were broken down and recycled for new building materials.
You can check out the images after the jump:
It’s been pretty much a year since ground was broken on the “spaceship” Apple Campus 2, and things are progressing at a rate of knots.
In a new photo provided by Apple, and posted by the city of Cupertino, the company’s $5 billion campus can be seen taking shape. The image is a reminder of just how big the campus is set to be, since it will house a massive 13,000 employees — or the equivalent of 35 fully-filled Boeing 747s. Tim Cook has called the campus Apple’s “home for innovation and creativity for decades to come.”
The city of Cupertino’s website makes note of a schedule for the project, noting that earthwork is set to continue until the middle of next year, while construction on the building itself will be completed by late 2016.
To get a true appreciation for how massive Apple’s new UFO-shaped campus will be, a drone equipped with a GoPro was flown over the construction site.
We’ve seen some aerial pictures of the site beginning to take shape as work begins on Campus 2, but this is by far the coolest look yet.
While construction of its new campus is underway, Apple is having trouble accommodating its workforce in the Cupertino, California area.
Apple is now leasing a 290,000-square-foot office complex in Sunnyvale, an area north of Cupertino and just east of Mountain View. Up to 1,450 employees could be moved into the space, reports the San Jose Mercury News. Since it will be years before its massive “Campus 2” is ready to be occupied, Apple continues to struggle not having enough space for its corporate workforce.
Progress on Apple’s forthcoming “spaceship” campus continues to march on, as new aerial photos taken by AppleToolbox show.
The photos clearly illustrate how the site is taking on its circular shape, with plenty of work being done by construction workers and heavy machines.
We never thought they’d do it, but Apple is splitting their stock 7-to-1—and on our newest CultCast, we discuss that and other surprising (and non-boring) notes from their recent financial call. Plus, the best way to get the Apple stuff you want at lower prices; OS X betas now available to all; Apple Maps spots Nessie; Apple celebrates Earth Day with some great new marketing; why we’re crazy about Apple Campus 2; and forget Ashton, how about Leonardo DiCaprio as the next Steve Jobs?
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A video detailing the creation of Apple Campus 2 was released this morning featuring glimpses of the Spaceship’s architectural achievements in natural ventilation, renewable energy, trees regrowth, and other revolutionary tech that’s will make it one of the best office buildings in the world.
The video also features interviews of the people behind the campus, like architect Norman Foster, who tells the story of how Steve Jobs recruited him for the job of building Apple Campus 2 and how the project didn’t start as a circular building but grew into that as the intensive project progressed.
Check out the video below, before Apple takes it down:
This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine
Architecture hasn’t really ever been considered too important in the brick and mortar-averse tech industry. It wasn’t all that long ago that digital utopians proclaimed physical geography dead altogether, with a vocal minority apparently pleased to leave the actual world behind them and embrace the cyberspace of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the technological breakthroughs of Silicon Valley have advanced almost inversely to the region’s architecture. In a brave new world of lush rolling hills and the always impressive San Francisco Bay, the most that the majority of companies have managed to come up with are drab industrial parks filled with two-story, cubicle-lined buildings.
Apple and the city of Cupertino have reached an agreement that will see the tech giant paying more taxes to the city as part of the deal for its new Apple Campus 2 project.
The new deal is up to receive final approval Tuesday night. If approved, Apple’s tax increase will actually come from a reduction in the percentage of the tax rebate the city gives Apple each year, according to a report from the LA Times.
Under its current deal with the Apple, the city of Cupertino gives back about 50% of the sales taxes it receives from Apple-related purchases. From now on that number will only be about 35% of sales taxes.
Here’s what Cupertino Mayor Orrin Mahoney had to say about the new tax agreement:
Apple’s glass and steel mothership isn’t scheduled to land in Cupertino until 2016, but we’ve already seen plenty of renders of what Apple Campus 2 will look like from the outside. We covered all the fine details of Apple Campus 2 in the last issue of Cult of Mac Magazine, but some new renders have been released giving us our first glimpses inside the mothership.
After digging through the latest Apple Campus 2 filings, Kyle Vanhemert at Wired found some unseen renderings that show what it will be like to work at Apple Campus 2, including new details on the underground theater, Transit Center, parking garage, visitors center, pavilion and much more.
Take a look:
Did you know that the new Apple Campus 2 “spaceship” is wider across than the Empire State Building is tall? It’s going to cost 60 times more than the Pentagon did back in 1943, too. Heck, you’ll be able to cram up to 35 jetliners full of passengers in its rounded confines without breaking a sweat.
The Cupertino City Council unanimously approved Apple’s plans for the tech company’s a couple of weeks ago, after a long, heartfelt public comment session.
We thought it would be great, then, to take a look at some of the details of the new campus, set to finish construction in 2016.
The proposed Apple Campus 2 is huge. Apple plans to put a 100,000-square-foot fitness center, 11,000 parking spaces, 2,000 bike parking spaces, 2.8 million square feet of office space, and a 100,000-square-foot lab. Oh, and a restaurant. All of this in four stories, housing 12,000 employees.
The Pentagon, in contrast, which itself was completed in 1943, has 3.7 million square feet of office space, is seven floors tall, and houses 25,000 people.
The Apple Campus 2 will have a 1,522 foot diameter, which means the Empire State Building could comfortably lie down somewhere inside its massive circular footprint. Heck, a T1-class Supertanker could fit in there, as well, with its 1,246 foot length, and you’d have to get somewhere around seven or eight blue whales–the largest known mammal on Earth–just to get across half of the diameter of the new Apple Campus. That’s a lot of krill.
The spaceship campus has plans to hold 12,000 employees within it’s solar-panel-using, green technology hallowed halls, which would fill something like 160 double-decker buses, or 35 Boeing 747 jets. The Apple folks will have it easier, as they’ll at least be able to get nice food there, and a much less foggy view in Cupertino than in London.
Of course, no look at anything tech-related is complete without a comparison to a fictional starship, and since we’ve been calling this the spaceship campus since Steve Jobs unveiled the design two years ago, it seemed fitting to see how it stacks up against the USS Enterprise. Unfortunately for trekkies, the new Apple Campus 2 has a diameter quite a bit larger than the original Gene Roddenberry creation.
The city of Cupertino itself, home not only to Apple founders Woz and Jobs but also author Raymond Carver and actor Aaron Eckhart, only has around five times the population as will work in the Apple Campus 2. Interestingly, the median income of Cupertino-based Apple employees is a bit lower than that of Cupertino in general, but perhaps that’s just a function of how much larger the city is than the building. Which, to be honest, doesn’t seem to be that much of a news item. It is, however, funny that a .27 square mile building can cause the kind of traffic jams that the city of 11.26 square miles seems to be mostly worried about.
Image: City Of Cupertino
