Apple’s new mothership isn’t expected to touchdown in Cupertino until 2016, but construction on the new campus is starting to hit a rapid pace, as new areal photos reveal the exterior walls are nearing completion as well as the construction of underground tunnels.
This week on the CultCast: Leander’s Big Adventure! Leander’s back to tell us about his top-secret mission to Apple HQ. Plus, CoM reviews editor Charlie Sorrell tells us about some cool gear he’s reviewing. We also run through a list of all the great hardware we’re expecting Apple to dump on us in just a few short months. And we wrap up with an all-new Get to Know Your Cultist, and this round has us diving into some of our favorite movies ever made. Guess who has the weird choice? You’re right, it’s Leander.
Hem and haw your way through each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the chuckles begin.
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Nokia’s incredible PureView camera technology is one of the reasons why so many Android users were desperate to see the Finnish firm ditch Windows Phone and bring Google’s platform to its flagship smartphones instead — and you could soon see the same technology in future iPhones.
Apple has used Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Nokia’s handset business as an opportunity to poach executives who are seeking new challenges, and the Cupertino company has just hired Lumia engineer and PureView camera expert Ari Partinen.
Apple watchers and employees might be excited about the forthcoming Apple 2 campus, but its development may not prove so popular with drivers.
For the next phase of construction on Apple’s massive 176-acre campus, work will require lane closures on surrounding streets of the campus site — meaning that traffic will be redirected through Cupertino.
Apple launched its new 8GB iPhone 5c in Europe this morning, but the cheaper handset is yet to reach the U.S. online store. That’s because it isn’t going to. The Cupertino company has confirmed that the device will only be available in a select few countries, and the U.S. isn’t one of them.
Apple has today announced that Peter Oppenheimer Apple, its senior vice president and chief financial officer, will retire at the end of September after 18 years with the Cupertino company. Oppenheimer will transition the role of CFO to Luca Maestri, Apple’s current vice president of finance and corporate controller. If you’re wondering about Peter Oppenheimer now, you can learn more about his career and contributions to Apple.
Apple is taking on “hundreds” of new engineers and supply-chain managers in China and Taiwan in an effort to speed up product development and offer a greater range of devices, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The Cupertino company has reportedly poached staff from HTC and other rival firms to create new teams in Shanghai and Taipei.
Apple was notably absent from the Super Bowl ad slots Sunday, but a new video touting the Mac’s transformative power is quickly making Cupertino the most talked-about company the morning after the big game. The impressive clip continues the Mac’s 30th-anniversary celebration, and it was shot entirely on iPhones in 15 locations across five continents.
On January 24, 1984, Apple Computer introduced the Macintosh. On January 25, 2014, in Cupertino, California, the public will be invited to celebrate the extended team whose efforts popularized the graphical user interface and WYSIWYG software, defining computing for the rest of us. In honor of the 30-year anniversary of the Mac, the Computer History Museum, Macworld/iWorld and All Planet Studios are planning a celebration of this seminal computer and the original Macintosh development team.
The Mac 30th Celebration will be start at 7 p.m. on January 25. The Flint Center venue is just a few miles from the Apple campus, and the event is being held in the same 2,300-seat auditorium where Steve Jobs introduced the Mac back in 1984!
iPhone 5s shipping times have improved this week as Apple slowly catches up with demand for the new device. At the beginning of this week, customers ordering the handset through the Apple online store would have seen shipping estimates of 2-3 weeks, but as of today, they’re down to 1-2 weeks.
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
When Apple announced iTunes Radio at WWDC this June, it looked like a lot of subscription radio services would take a massive hit. But for Pandora, things couldn’t be better. Since Apple’s new service made its debut alongside iOS 7 back in September, listening has increased by 9 percent.
If you switched from an iPhone to an Android-powered smartphone because you felt a 4-inch display was just too small, then Apple may give you a reason to switch back next year. Several industry experts are predicting that the Cupertino company will step up its pursuit of high-end Android smartphones by finally introducing a larger 5-inch display with the iPhone 6.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says he’s not interested in Apple’s new iPads because the neither model meets his needs. Woz didn’t get a chance to watch the keynote live because he was on a plane, but he caught up with the news when he landed and then emailed his wife to say, “nope, I don’t want one of those.”
The next best thing to actually being at an Apple press event is being able to watch the whole thing live from the comfort of your own living room. Unfortunately, the Cupertino company doesn’t live stream every event to the public, but you’ll be pleased to know it will be showing today’s iPad event.
While the highlight of Apple’s press event on Tuesday will undoubtedly be its new iPads, we were also expecting the Cupertino company to announce a new Apple TV. But a new report suggests the fourth-generation set-top box has been “delayed a bit,” and that it won’t be ready for tomorrow’s event after all.
Apple has assured iMessage users that it does not have easy access to the messages sent through its servers and that it has no desire to read them anyway. The statement comes after security researchers at QuarksLab claimed the Cupertino company could intercept iMessage communications between its users if it wanted to.
Dan Whisenhunt was visibly moved when speaking of his former employer Steve Jobs in front of the Cupertino City Council.
“A little more than two years ago, Steve shared his excitement about this project,” said Whisenhunt, Apple’s director of real estate and facilities, his voice breaking slightly. “It’s a campus to inspire innovation and collaboration between some of the finest engineers in the world.”
Just 10 days after the anniversary of the co-founder’s death, the giant “spaceship” campus is closer to landing in the city of Cupertino, which has a population of just over 60,000.
Whisenhunt’s speech enlivened a meeting that dragged on over four-and-a-half-hours–much longer than usual, Mayor Orrin Mahoney said–where locals fretted over the minutia of every intersection that might tangle the already clogged Silicon Valley commute. In the end, the council unanimously voted to OK the project. It still has one more hurdle to clear before Apple can break ground.
Apple has told iPhone suppliers in China to cut iPhone 5c orders for the fourth quarter following lower than expected demand for the device, The Wall Street Journal reports. Foxconn has been asked to cut orders by one-third, while Pegatron will reduce its shipments by 20%, sources claim.
Apple has today announced that Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry, will be joining the Cupertino company to take up a newly-created position as senior vice president of retail and online stores. Ahrendts will report directly to CEO Tim Cook and will oversee the strategic direction, expansion, and operation of Apple’s retail business.
Yes, I know, Apple’s new iPhones have been on sale for just over two weeks, but industry watchers are already looking ahead to its successor. Traditionally, the biggest iPhone releases come every other year, so we expect the iPhone 6 to be a big improvement over the iPhone 5s — not just an incremental upgrade that adds a faster processor and an improved camera.
In addition to a new design, Jefferies analyst Peter Misek says the iPhone 6 will come with a larger 4.8-inch display that will satisfy critics and fans of larger phones.
Apple’s new “Spaceship” campus has received approval from the Cupertino planning commission ahead of a city council meeting on October 15. The new building, which will become home to 14,000 Apple employees, is now another step closer to fruition, and providing there are no hiccups, Apple will be able to make a start on it next year.
Cable industry veteran and former CableLabs executive Jean-François Mulé became an engineering director at Apple last month, and he’s hard at work on “something big.” His appointment comes just weeks before Apple is expected to unveil its latest Apple TV, and at a time when the Cupertino company has been working hard to improve the $99 set-top box.
But is Mulé part of something a little more exciting?
Apple has today restored push email services on iOS devices in Germany almost two years after it had to be shut down following a legal battle with Motorola. The Cupertino company announced the change in a new support document, which explains how users can restore push services on their iOS devices.
Apple will be “unable” to launch a new iPad mini with Retina display this month due to supply constraints, according to sources in its supply chain, who have been speaking to Reuters. It’s thought the new device will only be available in “limited quantities” this year — if at all — and there’s a possibility it won’t be ready in time for the lucrative holiday shopping season.