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Tag: Cupertino

  • Steve Jobs’ Old Office Hasn’t Been Touched Since His Death

    Steve Jobs’ Old Office Hasn’t Been Touched Since His Death

    If you are wondering about the amount of reverence the folks at Apple have for late co-founder Steve Jobs, you really shouldn’t be. But to put it bluntly, it’s a lot.

    Take this little anecdote from Bloomberg’s extensive interview with current CEO Tim Cook:

    Steve Jobs’s office remains Steve Jobs’s office. After his death in 2011, Tim Cook, his friend and successor as Apple (AAPL) chief executive officer, decided to leave the sparsely decorated room on the fourth floor of 1 Infinite Loop untouched. It’s not a shrine or place of mourning, but just a space that Cook sensed no one could or should ever fill. “It felt right to leave it as it is,” he says. “That’s Steve’s office.”

    Like a parent who leaves a departed child’s room untouched, everyone at Apple has decided to keep Steve Jobs’ old office as is – even while everything around it changes.

    You might think that all of this reverence would be hard for Cook, and who’s to say it isn’t? Jobs was a god within the Apple culture. Polarizing outside of it, but inarguably heralded as a visionary within. Despite this, Cook certainly took one step toward making the company his own at the recent Apple press event.

    Cook channeled Jobs and his famous “one more thing” bit before announcing the Apple Watch, which some say is the first true Apple product of the Cook era.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • What in the Bloody Hell Is This Steve Jobs Statue?

    It’s unlikely that Steve Jobs is either looking up or looking down upon the world he left in 2011. But if he is, I’m sure he’s running around in some sort of delusional panic.

    You can debate the legacy of Steve Jobs until you’re blue in the face, but you’d be fighting a losing battle if you said that his products aren’t beautiful. Just take a look at your iPhone–It’s sleek, fluid, and there’s not a wasted component anywhere.

    Take a look at your iPhone again. Now, take a look at this statue of Steve Jobs that’s about to go up in Cupertino:

    What the shit?

    According to Apple Insider (via Netokracija), this is the Steve Jobs memorial statue that’s set to adorn the halls of the company’s Cupertino HQ. That’s actually a scaled-down model recently unveiled in Belgrade, but the full 3-5 meter statue will look like that when completed.

    The artist, sculptor Dragan Radenović , beat out over 10,000 entries in a contest to design the statue. Apparently, Apple liked its “imperfections.”

    If you’re wondering, the odd-looking appendages above the binary numerals are Cyrillic letters.

    I’d like to think that it’s actually some kind of special key to the room where they keep the iPhone prototypes. Yes, let’s go with that.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer Sends Letter To New Campus’s Neighbors

    Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer Sends Letter To New Campus’s Neighbors

    People living near the area that will soon become Apple’s new campus have begun receiving information from the company about the “Campus 2” project. The letter includes some pictures of the new campus, along with information about how it will impact the area. The letter also invited residents to offer feedback and express their concerns about the new campus.

    The letter, a copy of which was obtained by 9to5Mac, comes from Apple’s CFO, Peter Oppenheimer, and includes some interesting details about the new facility. It points out that the facility is not going to replaces Apple’s current headquarters, but will serve as additional R&D space. It will also serve as the venue for Apple’s new product launches. Unfortunately, the campus will not be open to the public, meaning that there won’t be any museum or on-site Apple Store. To minimize the site’s environmental impact, the entire roof will be a massive solar array.

    The letter also reassures local residents that the new facility is not a factory. There will be no manufacturing on the site. Additionally, the company will plant additional trees along the perimeter of the property and convert much of the site (which is currently paved) into green space. The building itself will be well back from the street, meaning that most neighbors and passersby will see the perimeter treeline, rather than the building itself.

    The letter can be seen below (click to enlarge):

    Apple Campus 2 Letter

    The letter included a postage-paid feedback card that recipients could return with their comments, questions, and concerns.

  • Steve Jobs Had A Willy Wonka Golden Ticket Idea

    Since the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, various little anecdotes abouts the deeply private man have come to the surface. Many were revealed in Walter Isaacson’s bestselling biography, but stories about Jobs have come from all directions.

    Today’s revelation is no doubt one of the best ones yet.

    Jobs, who by all accounts ran a tight ship, was at least, in theory, not above a little silliness. According to Ken Segall’s book Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success, Jobs once had the idea to put an Apple golden ticket inside the packaging of the 1 millionth iMac. That ticket would give the lucky user a trip to Cupertino, where Jobs would greet them in full Gene Wilder swag.

    MacRumors quotes the passage:

    Steve’s idea was to do a Willy Wonka with it. Just as Wonka did in the movie, Steve wanted to put a golden certificate representing the millionth iMac inside the box of one iMac, and publicize that fact. Whoever opened the lucky iMac box would be refunded the purchase price and be flown to Cupertino, where he or she (and, presumably, the accompanying family) would be taken on a tour of the Apple campus.

    Steve had already instructed his internal creative group to design a prototype golden certificate, which he shared with us. But the killer was that Steve wanted to go all out on this. He wanted to meet the lucky winner in full Willy Wonka garb. Yes, complete with top hat and tails.

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    Ken Segall is a former Apple ad guy who’s responsible for the whole “Think differently” campaign, and he also runs an Onion-type Apple news blog Scoopertino. We hope this Wonka thing isn’t a big joke.

    Can you see Steve Jobs giving the factory tour? He definitely had the enthusiasm about his products to pull it off. Although I can’t see him giving Apple to whatever little “Charlie” found the golden ticket.

    This is all funny, because just yesterday I suggested that Apple start putting tickets to their annual WWDC in Wonka Bars, considering how hard they are to get.

  • Apple’s New Campus Knocked as “Retrograde Cocoon”

    Apple’s proposed new headquarters in Cupertino, California is a giant 2.8 million square foot ring, complete with state-of-the-art curved glass windows and a massive emphasis on landscaping. In his presentation to the Cupertino city council in June, Steve Jobs said that the new campus could house over 12,000 people and over 7,000 trees.

    And according to L.A. Times Architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, it will be a “retrograde cocoon.”

    In a piece published over the weekend, Hawthorne discusses his perceived problems with the expansive new campus. He uses Steve Job’s proclamation that the new building would be “like a spaceship landed” to criticize the proposed campus as “doggedly old-fashioned.”

    Though the planned building has a futuristic gleam — Jobs told the council “it’s a little like a spaceship landed” — in many ways it is a doggedly old-fashioned proposal, recalling the 1943 Pentagon building as well as much of the suburban corporate architecture of the 1960s and ’70s. And though Apple has touted the new campus as green, its sprawling form and dependence on the car make a different argument.

    Not only is he critical of the design and the implied anti-green effects of the new campus, but he also criticizes the Cupertino city council for not pressing Jobs enough on the details behind the new project.

    At Jobs’ initial proposal, the city council appeared giddy with excitement. This led to a lot of chatter about their “fanboy” reactions to Jobs. Hawthorne asks why the council didn’t press Jobs about the actual architect behind the project. He discusses Jobs’ tight-lipped practices when it comes to design, saying –

    In his appearance before the City Council he said Apple had “hired some great architects to work with — some of the best in the world, I think.” But he never mentioned the high-wattage name of Norman Foster or the London firm Foster + Partners, whose logo is stamped on the preliminary plans for the campus. (Those plans are available for download on Cupertino’s website, cupertino.org.)

    It is a measure of Jobs’ tight grip on Apple’s reputation for in-house design innovation that even after hiring a celebrity architect like Foster he would keep that architect’s name under wraps; even now, three months after Jobs took the plans public in that council meeting, the Apple press office refuses to confirm that Foster + Partners indeed designed the project.

    You can see Job’s proposal and the council’s reaction in this video –

    In a nutshell, Hawthorne’s criticism is that the new campus “wraps its workers in a suburban setting,” away from the connection of the city. The new campus can be described as isolated and disengaged from civic space. Does the city council’s “enthusiasm” for the new project serve as a promotion of a “car-dependent approach to city and regional planning” that was good in the 70’s, but not so good anymore?

    It’s all about connection, or in this case, the lack therof –

    Still, the new Apple campus, which the company describes as “a serene and secure environment” for its employees, keeps itself aloof from the world around it to a degree that is unusual even in a part of California dominated by office parks. The proposed building is essentially one very long hallway connecting endlessly with itself.

    What do you think? Does a huge suburban campus like the one proposed by Apple promote isolation?

    Read more about the actual plans at cupertino.org.

  • Steve Jobs Presents Apple’s New HQ to Cupertino City Council

    Apple wants to centralize its campus and focus more on landscaping. That’s the message that came out of Steve Jobs’ presentation to the Cupertino City Council Tuesday evening. They propose to do this by building a massive office building that would expand the capacity of their centralized campus by over 400%.

    Apple’s original office park, according to Jobs, only houses around 2,600 to 2,800 people. But they’ve got “almost 12,000 people in the area.” So what have they been doing? Renting out buildings in areas that aren’t always adjacent to the original campus.

    Apple recently bought up about 150 acres in Cupertino that was once owned by Hewlett Packard. This is where Jobs is proposing that they build the new complex. In his presentation, Jobs said that the land is “kind of special to me,” citing the fact that Bill Hewett was one of his idols when he was 13.

    Jobs proposes the new Apple headquarters as one big building, housing 12,000 people. It looks awesome, to be quite honest. It’s one giant ring, with curved glass windows and tons of space in the middle for landscaping. It resembles either a spaceship or a giant metal donut. Either way, housing that many people in one centralized campus will be quite the achievement.

    Here’s what Jobs says about the new building:

    It’s a circle, so it’s curved all the way around, and if you’ve built something, you know it’s not the cheapest way to build something. There’s not a straight piece of glass on this building, and we’ve used our experience making retail buildings, and we know how to make the biggest pieces of glass in the world, for architectural use – and we want to make the glass specifically for this building here. We can make it curved all the way around the building. It’s pretty cool.

    Today, about 20% of the space is landscaping, most of it is big asphalt parking lots. We want to completely change this and make 80% of it landscaping. And the way we’re going to do this – we’re going to put most of the parking underground. And you can see what we have in mind. Today there are 37-hundred trees on the property, we’d like to almost double that.

    Also, here’s the entire video of the presentation, complete with council-member questions at the end. They seem enthusiastic about the venture. The slides of the proposed campus start around the 5 minute mark: