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A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

wired.com

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Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#61

Post by teniutza »

tuna-piano wrote: post #21

Beautiful building. I wonder though - for those who read the article and have worked in both suburban environments and urban ones - would you rather work in the amazing Apple spaceship in the suburbs, or a normal office building in a city-center? For me, I think I'd still prefer a short commute and the density of stuff that comes with being downtown.

With so many people working there, I'll be like working in a small(-ish) town. I don't know if the article mentioned it or not, but I would expect that a company of that level would provide some perks, like free snacks. To an employee, it would be like a short stroll to grab a bagel, or whatever people in that region like to eat, with the exception of it being free. One could get used to it, I bet...

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#62

Post by akgerber »

matsemann wrote: post #36

I'd wish they were a bit more futuristic than having 9000 parking spaces. Why not offer buses from where their employees live or other means of transportation? It's easy to say that most people drive, but that's only because everyone always make that the most convenient mode of transportation. With some effort something else could be even more convenient.

Because the postwar suburban land use of the surrounding area is designed exclusively around automobiles and makes it nearly impossible and extremely unpleasant to walk for transportation, a prerequisite of functional mass transit.

Silicon Valley has chosen to preserve its form of single-family suburban sprawl forever, at the cost of any human with a reasonable income being able to move there.

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#63

Post by MattRogish »

timc3 wrote: post #19

I am wondering why I find it kind of odd that it doesn't have a childcare center.

I was talking with a friend about this, that works at a big SV company that is known for high comp. Why don't they have a child care facility? Surely they can afford it!

His response was - paraphrasing - "What happens if someone quits, or is fired? In SV/SF, waits for child care facilities can easily take 6-12 months. If someone is terminated from our company, the last thing we want for them to do is have a crisis about where their children are going to go."

I believe they have a stipend, but I'm not sure about that.

Of course, I can't say if this is Apple's rationale, but it wouldn't surprise me if that had something to do with it.

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#64

Post by stephen_g »

ar15saveslives wrote: post #52

Guess how individual workspaces will look like. I bet it will be old good terrible gray 6x6 cubicles. EDIT: To all downvoters: https://assets.wired.com/photos/w_1970/wp-content/uploads/20...

Why guess? There are pictures in the article... In fact, the whole thing was apparently designed around the workspace concept... I have to presume, but it sounds like you didn't read the article before commenting.

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#65

Post by dschep »

sametmax wrote: post #45
poslathian wrote: post #33

5B for 13k employees - that's ~$384,000 in construction costs per head, operating and maintenance expenses are perhaps 5% of that annually (maybe more!) - taken together this is an office building that's costing apple ~$3500/head/mo . It's a beautiful office, but seriously? Avg apple cash comp is what, 12500/mo? 3500 is almost 30% of that!

You are missing the point. It's only an office because apple is a company. That could have been the great pyramids, saint sophia or notre dame. Your calculations are off because you don't realize that while a lot of servants are enjoying their life in the castle, it's been built for the royal family and its court.

Yup. It's a status symbol that happens to be an office space.

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#66

Post by tzs »

tuna-piano wrote: post #21

Beautiful building. I wonder though - for those who read the article and have worked in both suburban environments and urban ones - would you rather work in the amazing Apple spaceship in the suburbs, or a normal office building in a city-center? For me, I think I'd still prefer a short commute and the density of stuff that comes with being downtown.

I haven't been to Cupertino in many years, but from what I can see on maps and aerial/satellite images it looks like it hasn't changed a lot since I lived there.

My recollection is that "suburbs" is not really a good description. Suburbs bring to mind mostly residential neighborhoods with a few big shopping centers here and there, and not much within reasonable walking or biking range. Places where you find yourself often saying "I'll pick that up next time I'm in the city".

What it felt like to me was more like if you took several small towns and pushed them all close to each other. I could for the most part get around on my bike, but would occasionally want to go to something too far away (e.g., up to Stanford's bookstore for the annual Springer-Verlag sale).

Because it was like a bunch of small towns pushed together, with a layer of residential neighborhoods between them, there were almost always routes for biking between where I was and where the little pocket of density I wanted to be was that would mostly go through those very low traffic residential neighborhoods, so it felt much more safe and relaxing than biking in a major city.

(Wow. I just checked rent at the place I used to live. It was called the Villa Serra Apartments then, but is now called the Markham Apartments. I was paying $750/month for a 750 sq. foot apartment in 1991. Now they want between $3100 and $3800/month. Inflation alone would make $750 in 1991 about $1400 today. That's about 2.4% per year. To go from $750 to $3500 would be about 6.1% per year. Ouch!)

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#67

Post by mxfh »

matsemann wrote: post #36

I'd wish they were a bit more futuristic than having 9000 parking spaces. Why not offer buses from where their employees live or other means of transportation? It's easy to say that most people drive, but that's only because everyone always make that the most convenient mode of transportation. With some effort something else could be even more convenient.

Apple is building 11,000 parking spaces not because it wants to but because Cupertino, the suburban city where the new headquarters is located, demands it. Cupertino has a requirement for every building.

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21720269-dont-let-peo...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14067658

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#68

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

tuna-piano wrote: post #21

Beautiful building. I wonder though - for those who read the article and have worked in both suburban environments and urban ones - would you rather work in the amazing Apple spaceship in the suburbs, or a normal office building in a city-center? For me, I think I'd still prefer a short commute and the density of stuff that comes with being downtown.

I'd rather work from home, and have done for decades.

I'm not convinced it's a beautiful building. It's a very careful building, trying to be a temple and - IMO - failing.

What's missing? Randomness. Playfulness. Quirkiness. Fun. Colour. Warmth.

Individuality. Art.

At Pixar, everyone was encouraged to personalise their work space in a creative way.

I can't imagine that happening here, because it would be a mortal wound to the purity.

My guess is that it will feel very subtly oppressive rather than delightfully liberating. It'll be a quietly productive environment, in a slightly manic way, but it's hard to be creative when everything and everyone around you has the same company standard officially-approved look and feel.

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#69

Post by teniutza »

eddieroger wrote: post #35
strictnein wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is rather odd.

Is it? The large corporation I work for doesn't have an onsite childcare center. Instead we offer discounts for child care elsewhere, near the office, but not in. For a company as private and secretive as Apple, why even expose themselves to the risk of having people walking around a campus that they don't need to be if they can meet the need elsewhere, offsite?

I don't work for a big company. Every morning I take my daughter to daycare before going to work. Although not far from where we live (2 km), I still need to drive in the opposite direction. This means an extra ~20 minutes per morning. That's just the trip. Add to it the lack of parking spaces and rapidly decreasing chance of finding one after a certain time point. Not to mention that I need wake up a 3 year old at an unreasonably early hour for any child... Having an on-site childcare center would make a lot of things more simple and pleasant for my entire family.

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#70

Post by tonyedgecombe »

naravara wrote: post #11
larrymyers wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one giant wart that makes this whole project depressingly not futuristic: 9000+ parking spaces. The amount of unproductive space devoted to the storage of cars is just mind boggling. Not much has changed in how people get to work. Single occupancy cars all burning fossil fuel and expelling C02. It may not be a fancy spaceship, but the 100 year old building I work at in downtown Chicago has indoor bike parking and…

That's not really up to Apple unfortunately. Cupertino has all sorts of regressive laws about parking minimums and zoning. I suppose Apple is a big enough wheel that they could have probably rewritten those laws if they wanted to, but they're an electronics company, not city planners. WTH would they know about decent zoning regs?

Well they probably don't know much about architecture either, that's why they hired Norman Foster.
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