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A Peek At Apple's Planned $5B HQ
theodp writes "The Mercury News has an exclusive sneak peek of Apple's planned headquarters in Cupertino, which Steve Jobs personally sought approval for in 2011. 'We found that rectangles or squares or long buildings or buildings with more than four stories would inhibit collaboration,' Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said, explaining the motivation behind the so-called Apple Ring. Nice, but if you wanted to hurt the feelings of the Design Gods at Apple, you could point out that, for all its $5 billion glory, what Apple calls 'the best office building ever' doesn't look all that different from an old-school $3.95 6250 BPI magnetic tape reel (still available on eBay, kids!)."
So what if it looks like a tape reel?
A 1/2" reel of computer tape has a much smaller hub diameter.
Stupidest Apple-trolling article on /. ever. And considering the number of Apple trolling articles on /., that's saying something.
/.!
Uh, gotta be funny. In Soviet Russia, Apple trolls
The CB App. What's your 20?
Merck built their corporate HQ in the shape of a gigantic ring back in 1990, on something like 1,000 acre site.
http://newyork.citybizlist.com/sites/default/files/styles/article/public/field/image/merck.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merck_headquarters
Working inside a giant ring is such a pain in the butt - except for the fact that you cant get lost.
They are selling the site (due to many things) but including the fact that while many people may be "assigned" to work there, it is usually pretty empty.
WIth a diameter of about 1/3 of a mile a collaborator will need to walk about 1/2 mile for a face to face in the other's office on the opposite side of the ring. Good exercise but perhaps a waste of time.
And where's the write ring?
Nate
Unless you are on the first floor and can walk across a courtyard a ring is really a long building looped so the ends connect.
With a linear building of length L, the max distance between two offices is L. For a circular building, it is L/2.
It seems very inefficient to me. A simple cube would very likely be far better than this design.
Most people don't like working in offices that receive no natural light.
How long until Samsung and Microsoft both announce their plans to build similar circular "spaceship-like" HQs?
Apple hasn't teched far enough to unlock the warp core.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Now that Steve Jobs is gone, Apple need another Reality Distortion Field Generator. Why not think big? ...
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Actually, it looks more like a DECtape.
They make phones. They act like they are the DoD.
Well, I wonder why R&D is shuffled off to the rectangular buildings away from the glorious ring.
Why don't they like those engineers?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
If Apple hardware is mediocre, what is high end hardware?
(Note: I am a Linux fanboy and generally avoid Mac HW due to it's poor Linux support)
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
all in the subject...
I hate natural light. It burns skin, hurts eyes, washes out color, and makes stuff hot. Fuck outside and anyone who likes it.
This is the Vatican.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The only way to get even less window space in relation to interior volume would be to design it as a sphere. Even a borg cube would have more windows.
May I suggest a modest design improvement: dig a canal to the bay and moor Steve Job's equally iconic and ugly yacht right in the center of the frisbee ring. The point is so nobody forgets him, right?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I can't believe no one came up with this yet:
;-)
One ring to rule them all...
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
So, if it takes 14 minutes to walk the entire ring, you're never more than a 7 minutes walk away to any other point of the ring.
The Pentagon ... is a building.
You said it first. That's the first thing that came to mind when I saw it. This is the great innovation they came up with after 70 years.
Comparison: $5B Planned Apple HQ and Old-School Magnetic Tape Reel. Would look even more similar with a white write ring! :-)
This is what companies do when they have too much cash. How much is this building per square foot?
Even less if you walk through the inner courtyard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Communications_Headquarters
All all glass building with lots of computers and the terminals with the world's secrets flashing across. An interesting concept.
Slashdot Beta should die a painful death.
Right. And a cube of the same area per floor would have a maximum distance between offices on a given floor roughly 1/5 that of this foolish design.
Not to mention the sprawl of this monstrosity. It appears from the drawing to have only 4-5 floors. By increasing the number of floors to say 20 you could also markedly reduce the average distance between offices.
Absolutely potty (toilet bowl like) design.
doesn't look all that different from an old-school $3.95 6250 BPI magnetic tape reel
Or a ring, bracelet, flying saucer, hoola hoop, donut, or a million other things that are round. What is your point?
They took the Pentagon and rounded the corners. Apple is good at the rounded corners thing.
Who else thinks it'd be fun to sneak onto the roof ... and paint the roof like a giant Stargate?
I have to wonder about a company who has lost 30% of it's stock price in the last year building a $5B headquarters.
I mean, I'm grateful to AAPL, since it put my daughter through college, but I gotta say, I'm glad I got out at $680.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"On a given floor"
And there's the thing.
This design gets everyone into 4 stories, and probably will use long ramps between floors, instead of stairs (like the Pentagon does) This means you can easily *walk* to any office, instead of spending time standing in a box being lifted up and down, or powering up or down 15 flights of stairs. And like a poster above me says, in a long straight building, the maximum distance between two offices is L, in this building it is L/2 (because the ends are connected) Couple that with being able to cut across the hub, (with California's generally decent weather, this remains a highly viable route) and your transit time starts to get pretty short. (design docs say its 14 minutes to walk the entire loop of the building, so a maximum of 7 minutes if you stay indoors to get to the office farthest from you, and much less if you cut across the hub)
Plus, despite the 'sunlight is evil to my delicate skin' people posting here, Designers tend to really like natural light, and this torus shape allows more offices to be lit by natural light than a cube. With all the modern tech in multi-panel insulated glass (to cut down on heat) these days, the ability to light your office building with natural sunlight most working hours saves you a LOT of money on power. (which looks good on your 'environmental resumé')
As for sprawl, they are dedicating a ton of space to parkland around and 'in' the structure, so who cares if the building is 1/3rd a mile across. I'd rather have that then a big cube surrounded by asphalt parking lot. (but that may just be me.)
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Sally you mean there is something outside of Apple?
It is called design over function, I pity the commuter employee already. This follows the pattern though, remember that ridiculous yacht design Jobs planned?
Yup, the Jon Ive approach to office space.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Unless you are on the first floor and can walk across a courtyard a ring is really a long building looped so the ends connect.
With a linear building of length L, the max distance between two offices is L. For a circular building, it is L/2.
Which is why the GP mentioned a cube, rather than a liner building.
Even multiple linear shorter buildings side by side with sky bridges over interior open space would
more efficient.
This is also why Buildings tend to grow taller, because in addition to needing less land,
elevators are faster than walking.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
With a linear building of length L, the max distance between two offices is L. For a circular building, it is L/2.
You sure? The maximum distance between two offices in a filled circular building is equal to its diameter (L). If it's empty inside, it's pi*L/2 - which is larger than L.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Typical Apple. They are re-inventing the Pentagon (the DOD headquarters).
Maybe they should have several headquarters---in different colors.
It's obviously Steve Job's Walled Garden!
They made a mouse with no buttons? Do you bang it on the table to click?
This space intentionally left blank
Without some kind of conveyance system this building is going to be next to useless. Either some kind of shuttle or miniature rail system, maybe even those horizontal escalators they have in airports would do the job. But no one is going to work in a building where you have to walk several miles every day. And whats with all of the soft focus renderings? Was the software they were using so bad that they had to blur every single image to make them look less crappy?
Usually people make quips about Apple's "no button mouse" as a joke, because of Apple's history of one button mice. The physical button is still there, and provides the expected tactile feedback. Apple's mice and trackpads also provide support for buttons, scrolling, and other operations via gestures. It's not ideal for people who expect tactile feedback, but it does work well.
While their chicklet keyboards are no Model M, they also perform as well as traditional laptop keyboards and most modern desktop keyboards. Your point about missing keys is a valid one, though I suspect that most people don't even notice it.
So what's your point again?
but you still need to walk up to half a mile to get somewhere, and there is no elevator option.
I'd rather spend 2 minutes waiting for a lift to go up 10 floors than walk for 7 minutes to go see someone.
Unless you are on the first floor and can walk across a courtyard a ring is really a long building looped so the ends connect. It seems very inefficient to me.
They're building it this way so they can host the Segway 500.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
If you aren't willing to cross the courtyard, like when it's raining, L/2 is correct. He define L as the length of the building, which when warped into a circle is still L. If you are willing to take a shortcut through the courtyard, then it's only L/pi.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Seems quite problematic. if a company is now building a $5B edifice to the egos of the bosses - is that going to make a good investment into the future? I don't think so.
The real world is full of people waiting for Apple to make a misstep - there is plenty of office space available at reasonable rates.
Sounds like another resident of Silo 18.
You are still going to need a parking lot. Presumably it will be sized for the number of occupants so the area will be the same.
Long ramps between levels will really suck. Suppose the office you want to go to is directly above yours. Now you have to walk to where the ramp is, negotiate the ramp, and then return.
If you are on say the 4th floor and want to cross the courtyard and go to an office on the 4th floor on the other side navigating 8 ramps would really be a PITA.
The surface area of this design is also an issue because it affects ecological footprint. A long relatively thin cross section is the worst possible.
Overhead Shot: $5B Planned Apple HQ and Old-School Magnetic Tape Reel. Less tape would increase the resemblance!
IOC headquarters!
But if Mongols attacked this one, no problem - just revoke their H-1Bs. (Bada...ling!)
However it doesn't feed ego. Really, really, want to throw huge amounts of money away, do curved buildings. It adds levels of complexity to construction and associated cost beyond anything people outside of the construction industry appreciate. Not only does it cost at lot (basically doubling or tripling construction costs) but it is enormous wasteful in internal space utilisation. With sales falling I would wonder why Apple investors would allow this Apple corporate executive ego driven indulgence.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
According to Businessweek (http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-04/apples-campus-2-shapes-up-as-an-investor-relations-nightmare) the cost is $1500 per square foot, or about 3 times the cost of luxury downtown skyscraper space.
Not totally true. Shareholders can elect a new board.
This building is not a circle, it's an infinigon.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
You're both wrong. L is the linear size of the unrolled strip. If it is straight, the ends are L apart. If the same size strip is rolled in a circle, no point is farther than L/2 away from any other point in walking distance along the strip. If you walk across the courtyard, you cut L/2 to L/pi for the worst case.
Your shitty borg cube doesn't have any natural light except the few outside spaces. If you had any imagination, you would have specified a hemisphere, or even a sphere with one half of it underground. Or bury the whole sphere a la the Umbrella bunker under Raccoon City. Then it wouldn't take up ANY land area.
A sphere is the smallest possible envelope, with the least surface area, for any given volume.
But the Apple design is far superior esthetically, much more realistic to construct, and still extremely ergonomic. How many large cube or sphere buildings do you know of?
Building that in Cupertino is a good thing for the city. It's a blah suburb.
Now here's a prestige research center - IBM Alamaden Research Center. That place produced several Nobel Prizes. It's on an isolated mountaintop. You drive for a mile after entering the property before reaching the buildings. The view from the cafeteria is of mountains, with no other buildings in sight.
It's also half-empty since IBM cut back.
To reach the same fourth floor on the opposite extreme, why would you descend four floors, walk 540 meters straight, then go back up four floors? You could just walk around the perimeter on the same floor for 800 meters. The worst case around the perimeter between any two points is seven minutes walking. The mean case is three and a half minutes. Likely the median case is less than that, as the distribution of workers is presumably intelligently laid out. It's nice that you presumably have the choice, though.
If you do have to reach a different floor, the mean case is only two floors.
Seems to me to be an excellent tradeoff between teleportation, physical fitness, and pleasant breaks.
Furthermore, I haven't seen any confirmation that only ramps are available between floors. As far as I can tell, that is conjecture. It seems likely to me that elevators and/or escalators will also be available.
Texas has too many fags.
You're right; staying adjacent to San Francisco should help them avoid the queers. /facepalm
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
...a bigger(?) version of GCHQ in England....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Right. For a bunch of nerds I'm surprised how difficult this is for some.
For a bunch of nerds I'm surprised how difficult this is for some.
That's the average autodidact for you...
Required reading for internet skeptics
what this is, is an epiphany in building design. Squares are unnatural, and so are enclosed office spaces. Most people don't work well in isolation, which is why prisons exist - to isolate you. If this design is a: open plan (not even bullpens, thank you) and b: open to let in as much natural light as is humanly possible, then I for one would not only reconsider my career direction to work in such a place, I would willingly relocate to do so. I've tried to work under fluorescents, it made me ill. Give me a window next to my workstation or we're not having a conversation.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I would point out that "efficiency" (even your comically naive understanding of it) isn't the only factor at play when one designs a building...
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
You mean ... going ... *gulp* outside?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Maybe because sales aren't falling: http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2013/01/applelinechart.jpg
People don't get it. It's the end of a really long barrel. They are going to use it to shotgun Steve's ashes into space.
Why "both wrong" when you agree with one?
While I agree that a curved building will be more expensive (I've worked on a plumbing re-design on a round building, e.g.), it won't double or triple costs, and a long, gradually curved building won't be more inefficient in space utilization than most attempts at architectural aesthetics are.
by your argument pi = 4.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2xYjiL8yyE
As a building estimator contract administrator, curving buildings doubles or triples cost dependent upon how strongly you adhere to maintaining a curve rather the segmenting the structure.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The math is an example, not 'required' to find a short route. And if the design is so flawed, then tell me why they've not torn down the Pentagon, and a dozen other round layout buildings like it around the world, several of which where lauded for their intelligent and functional design.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
I'm no doctor, but if you are a man and consider a ring to be phallic, then something is wrong. Better to get this checked now than to wait. Trust me - a friend worked the STD clinic when studying and he saw the consequences if men who wait until shit is the size of a grapefruit before getting it checked out.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Nah, it generates the events itself. It knows when you want to click better than you do.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
of course they can. it says so right here on the label.
Silly Apple: Spending $5 billion on a building, when they could have bought a tape real for $4 to do the same thing.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Curved walls have been possible since forever.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The Pentagon was completed in 1943 when the Government Communications Headquarters was still crammed into Bletchley Park.
Sure, the Pentagon is not a circle, but it is a multi-ringed structure designed to optimize some of the same things that Apple has claimed to have solved with their design.
This
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
About as good an idea as a watch.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Inefficient is correct. Trying to utilize space that is organized in any sort of non-rectangular building is a nightmare and ends up with lots of wasted space, irregularly shaped rooms and offices, and lots of hurt feelings.
My office moved from two floors of a square building into one large corner of a triangular building. All of the offices were smaller, some of the offices were triangle shaped. Some of them had weird little unusable alcoves in them. Despite the actual rented space being larger, and the individual offices being smaller and going from two kitchens down to one, and going from two server rooms down to one, we were immediately out of room to grow upon moving in.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Hey the earth looks like a basketball, what a foolish idea!
The building is circular, so they couldn't get the cubes to fit. So they had to put the engineers in another building.
The architect had planned some nice decorative rounded corners, but Apple sued him into oblivion.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
You can attach small plaques to the walls (with rounded corners of course) that have words on them to say where you are.
For the benefit of people like you, it's possible to either replace the words or supplement them with pictures.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
My 3pm meeting ends at 4pm, so I'll only be 7 minutes late for my 4pm meeting. Assuming my 3pm meeting doesn't go over.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
What would the distance travelled be if employees were shot out of a trebuchet to the other side of the building?
How many tech companies built a palace at the top and it becomes a museum or office complex or Oracle swallows it up?
After the collapse of the world economy, this building will be used for gladiator-style combat.
You'll feel better when you get your Precious back.
...and that's different than now how, for abutting meetings in different locations?
Well if my building is a large square, I can take a diagonal hallways, so instead of pi * d, I can do sqrt(x2+y2). If my building is a cube and the elevator shafts run diagonally (which they don't, but stairwells kind of do) then it's sqrt(x2+y2+z2).
And I'll take a sqrt over a linear distance any day of the week.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire