"Jobs was adamant that the new campus house indigenous flora, and in particular he wanted fruit trees from the orchards he remembered from growing up in Northern California."
A perfect example of a the stereotypical Californian mindset. Indigenous is what California was like when one first experienced it and everything should remain unchanged into the future.
Edit: On second thought, this is just a statement from the article's author. It's unlikely Jobs would not have confused indigenous California flora with fruit trees.
That's a copout. Cupertino demands it because businesses have abused public streets before (e.g. relying on public parking for business purposes); if Apple had gone to Cupertino with an actual plan, they may have allowed fewer spaces, but since Apple didn't and just accepted the requirement it is because Apple has no plans to reduce it.
Agreed, the idea that Apple couldn't possibly have any influence over municipal policies is laughable. They just didn't try.
Some fights are simply more economical to not fight. Especially when going up against city regs and such. Not to mention that any changes made on Apple's behalf could very easily have unintended consequences down the road (such as parking spilling out of an undersized lot and into surrounding neighborhoods).
That's a copout. Cupertino demands it because businesses have abused public streets before (e.g. relying on public parking for business purposes); if Apple had gone to Cupertino with an actual plan, they may have allowed fewer spaces, but since Apple didn't and just accepted the requirement it is because Apple has no plans to reduce it.
Agreed, the idea that Apple couldn't possibly have any influence over municipal policies is laughable. They just didn't try.
I do think they have tried few times, and probably many times with this project too but it doesn't always go well.
In Bay Area any new development faces all kinds of criticism from the city & residents. Most of the world would love to have all the tech companies in the backyard but in Bay Area they are more treated with contempt.
In someways I'm even surprised they managed to build this mostly in a way they wanted.
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 ab…
Seems like a bullshit excuse that's using the illusion of empathy (which is some extra infuriating bullshit). I'd much rather the option of on-site daycare and dealing with the fallout of leaving a job myself.
I'd rather not have my kids under the control of my company.
You're underestimating how much people love their cars. I formerly worked at Microsoft (the Redmond campus), which bends over backwards and does pretty much everything possible to keep people from driving to work. They have company shuttle buses, they give you a free card for public transit (and Seattle's is pretty good, compared to the Bay Area's), they pay you a bonus for using carpools/vanpools, and they have bike…
It's not like these people are being irrational. If driving is faster, then these folks will do so. Given the property prices in the Seattle area, they are probably as close as possible to work as their budget will allow. They're probably at the edge of their tolerable commute as it is.
Maybe as self interested individuals they aren't being irrational, but collectively as a civilization, it's irrational. The early proponents of the mechanized garden city were naive, and we've carried on perpetuating that naivete for 80 years now, because that's just the way we do it. What a mess. If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
The webpage is incredibly crappy. The opener image is a whopping 7.85MB in size. Even on a 60M connection, I was reminded of the image loading of yesteryears' 56k modems. The rest of the images don't seem to want to load until I scroll past them. There's a loud autoplay video that plays as soon as you scroll to it. The slideshow is nigh unusable on mobile. The text is way too big with way too much whitespace wasted on both sides.
In summary, the webpage is depressingly badly designed, in stark contrast to the awesome impressive building it describes.
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!
Except it makes more sense to depreciate over the useful life of the building (standard: 50 years) which brings you to a more reasonable ~$8k/year/employee cost of building use.