Apple Inc. HQ: Think Different

[Animo]

Futuristic "Apple City" Planned for Cupertino



Paul Daniel Ash
MMi Staff Writer

Apple has been working secretly with the world-renowned designer of the Hong Kong International Airport on the design of its new campus in Cupertino, according to a business publication in Spain. El Economista [googletrans] profiles "Apple City," which has been designed by Norman Foster - who also worked on the design of all-solar Masdar City in Abu Dhabi - to be at the cutting edge of energy efficiency and sustainability, and will feature a network of tunnels underground instead of roads connecting the buildings.

The design process has reportedly been going on for months, but Apple just bought a disused 98-acre parcel of land from Hewlett-Packard for the new Apple City, right next to 50 acres the company bought back in 2006. The company is outgrowing its current headquarters at One Infinite Loop, Apple spokesman Steve Dowling told the San Jose Mercury News, saying "we now occupy 57 buildings in Cupertino and our campus is bursting at the seams." The acquisition of the new plot of land will allow the project to go forward.

Apple City reportedly takes a lot of elements from the Foster + Partners design of Masdar City, which is being built from the ground up to be carbon-neutral and zero waste, with no cars allowed inside the city walls and personal rapid transit "pods" to take everyone around. Apple City will also be car-free, with all buildings connected by tunnels. In addition to giving employees an easier way around the 146-acre campus, which is split by Pruneridge Avenue and Interstate 280, the tunnels will also eliminate all roads and parking lots on the surface. "The buildings which will house the engineers and R&D will also be multifunctional and will incorporate cutting-edge technology in materials and equipment as well as renewable energy resources," El Economista's report says.

[Animo]

Seth Weintraub



Masdar, Abu Dhabi

El Economista reports (English)that renowned British architect Norman Foster is hard at work designing Apple’s new campus in Cupertino. The 100 acre campus was picked up from HP last month for a measly $300M.

The architect has some pretty incredible plans, including an underground tunnel system linking the two campuses (called it). In fact, the entire road transportation system will operate through a network of tunnels (tubes?) that will clear the surface areas for green. “The buildings which will house the engineers and R&D will also be multifunctional and will incorporate cutting-edge technology in materials and equipment as well as renewable energy resources,” according to the report.



Apple has repeatedly said that it is stretching its current campus to capacity.

The campus will be modeled after Masdar, Abu Dhabi, considered the first city in the world without cars or carbon emissions (capacity 50,000).

The report makes many mentions of the term ‘Apple City’. We’re not certain if that is official or not (we hope it catches on).

[Animo]

By Frank Michael Russell
frussell@mercurynews.com
Posted: 05/21/2011 01:02:00 AM PDT
Updated: 05/21/2011 09:39:40 AM PDT







Apple (AAPL) opened its first retail store 10 years ago this week.
That store, in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., was followed later the same year by a couple dozen other Apple Stores in locations including the epicenter of Silicon Valley (yes, Valley Fair mall).

"Our attitude is, retailing is really hard," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said at the time, according to this newspaper's archives. "A lot of very smart people have gotten their heads handed to them."

In the past decade, we've spent countless hours (and thousands of dollars) at the Apple Stores at Valley Fair, Palo Alto and elsewhere -- so Tech Notebook was intrigued by blog posts this week that Apple will be giving its stores a major redesign, perhaps as soon as this weekend.

According to the 9to5Mac blog, the "Apple Store 2.0" makeover has been led by Jobs and Jonathan Ive, the Cupertino company's senior vice president for industrial design. The changes will include new personalized product setup areas, "beefed-up displays" and iPads with prices and technical specs next to the Macs and "i" products on sale, according to the blog.

Boy Genius Report reported that numerous employees have been asked to work an overnight shift that begins when the doors close Saturday night. Employees will be required to "lock cell phones in the main office" and "sign an NDA with Apple," the blog reported, referring to a nondisclosure agreement.
Adding to the intrigue, "Apple employees will be putting up black curtains at all stores so that people walking outside cannot see inside," and mandatory meetings are scheduled for Sunday, according to the Boy Genius Report post.
AppleInsider, meanwhile, reported that the stores are receiving dozens of iPads that employees will use to help customers. "Everyone working on any given day could be equipped with an iPad, perhaps in place of an iPod touch-based EasyPay terminal, which Apple stores switched to in 2009," the blog noted.

Social games: Thanks in part to the launch of "CityVille" -- which brought new fans to its flagship "FarmVille" game -- San Francisco online upstart Zynga extended its lead in the social games market last year, according to researcher IHS Screen Digest.

"During 2010, Zynga played a central role in expanding the size of the PC social networking games market, attracting millions of new users with its popular titles offered through Facebook," IHS analyst Piers Harding-Rolls noted in an email this week.

According to IHS, consumer spending on Zynga games and other revenue reached $544 million in 2010, giving the company a 39.1 percent market share -- up 4.2 percentage points from the year before.

Overall, the social games market had 116.4 percent growth in 2010, when it reached $1.4 billion.

Playfish, owned by Redwood City video game publisher Electronic Arts (ERTS), was No. 2 in the market, according to IHS. At No. 3 was Palo Alto-based Playdom, now owned by Burbank media behemoth Disney.

Oprah effect?: Tech Notebook is often fascinated by the differences in the "trending now" topics on Yahoo and the "hot searches" on Google Trends.
For example, as we wrote Friday, Yahoo's (YHOO) "trending now" included such pop-culture names as Kate Gosselin, Haley Reinhart, Kirk Cameron and Janice Dickinson.

Google (GOOG) Trends' hot searches, by contrast, included "rapture 2011," "preakness 2011," "lance armstrong" and, uh, Haley Reinhart (who apparently was eliminated this week from "American Idol").

Of course, Oprah Winfrey, the queen of pop culture herself, retired this week from her long-running daytime talk show, and Yahoo has found an "Oprah effect" on its Internet search traffic.

"Anytime Oprah gives her stamp of approval, people take note," Yahoo revealed this week in a news release. As just one example, searches on Yahoo for "steel cut oatmeal" skyrocketed 5,400 percent after Oprah's endorsement.

[Animo]

WASHINGTON: Just weeks after Amazon and Google unveiled their music offerings, Apple appears set to raise the bar.

The Cupertino, California-based gadget-maker is expected to launch a new Web-hosted music service next month, according to multiple reports, after negotiating deals with at least three of the four major record labels.

The service is likely to be presented at Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference, which opens in San Francisco on June 6 and which has been the venue for past launches of high-profile Apple products.

According to The New York Times, Apple's service will allow music stored in the Internet "cloud" to be listened to on multiple devices -- from computers to smartphones to touchscreen tablets.

A cloud-based service would allow streaming of digital music from an online collection and free up a user from having to connect their various devices to transfer songs housed on a computer hard drive.

Online retail powerhouse Amazon launched a Cloud Drive and Cloud Player music service in late March that allows subscribers to upload digital music to Amazon servers and play it on a computer or an Android device.

Internet search giant Google jumped into the music market in early May with a Google Music service that lets people store their music collections in online libraries for streaming to computers, smartphones and tablets.

Google Music, which is in beta, or test phase, and is invitation-only for the moment, does not sell songs, however, and only allows users to upload the music they already own to Google servers, a time-consuming process.

While Amazon and Google may have gotten the jump on Apple in taking music to the cloud, the maker of the Macintosh computer, iPod, iPhone and iPad appears poised to launch a more comprehensive service.

Apple's ace in the hole is likely to be iTunes, the online music store it launched in 2003 which boasts more than 200 million customers and which has sold more than 10 billion songs.

In addition, Amazon and Google launched their music services without agreements with the four major record labels: EMI Music, Sony Music Entertainment , Universal Music Group and the Warner Music Group .

According to the Times, Apple has already hammered out agreements with EMI, Sony and Warner and talks are ongoing with Universal.

Discussions are also continuing between Apple and the music publishers who control copyrights and represent songwriters, the newspaper said.

Besides allowing for music purchases through iTunes, Apple's agreements with the record labels and the publishers should give users instant online access to their existing iTunes music libraries.

"With these licenses, Apple will have secured the cloud music high ground despite being the last to launch," MG Siegler of technology blog TechCrunch said.

"Apple is likely going to be able to do the one thing that is absolutely crucial for cloud music to take off: offer library syncing without uploading," Siegler said in a blog post.

The New York Times said Apple's cloud music offering may be integrated with its MobileMe subscription service which allows Macintosh owners to access files stored on Apple servers.

Apple is also likely to include features from Lala, a Palo Alto, California, company it bought in December 2009 that hosted digital music collections on the Web. Apple shut down Lala just a few months after the purchase.

[Animo]

By Josh Ong

Apple retail stores have taken the wraps off Apple's new retail upgrade, which makes use of interactive iPad displays to provide product information, pricing and features.

Apple launched "Retail 2.0" on Sunday morning in commemoration of the 10th anniversary of Apple retail stores, as noted by Mac Prices Australia. The Cupertino, Calif., company opened its first retail stores on May 19, 2001, in McLean, Virginia and Glendale, Calif.

According to the report, the main change is the addition of stationary iPads placed next to other Apple products in order to display product prices, information and features. The touchscreen tablets can also be used to compare models and ask for help from a specialist. Photos of the new iPad display units reveal that the devices are placed in plexiglass.

The iPads appear to be running a custom software, as customers report that pressing the home button on the tablets does nothing. Though the power cable for the device does not appear to connect to the dock, one person familiar with the matter said the cable is indeed connected to the dock connector, but is "very well hidden." Also, detaching the cable will reportedly activate an alarm.

Some reports also suggested that Apple retail employees were wearing party hats to celebrate the occasion. Customers reported via Twitter that the Apple store updates created a "totally new experience."







AppleInsider revealed on Wednesday that Apple was stockpiling iPads in preparation for a retail overhaul. The new in-house iPads were due to be rolled out alongside an updated version of RetailMe, Apple's proprietary retail software.



Apple reportedly scheduled overnight shifts for retail employees in preparation for the updates to the Apple store. AppleInsider was first to report in April that Apple was blocking employees from taking vacation from May 20 to May 22. Mandatory meetings have been scheduled on Sunday morning and evening for Apple retail staff.

Apple has also taken offline the Order Status page from its website until Sunday, May 22 in order to perform a system update.

[arturo]

I get the AppleCity article being posted here...but what does Apple introducing cloud music have to do with development??

[Animo]

It's a topic for everything about Apple really! It's just something to attract more traffic since the project hasn't really started at the moment.

Originally Posted by arturo

I get the AppleCity article being posted here...but what does Apple introducing cloud music have to do with development??

[desertpunk]

Mashable

More iCloud Details Emerge

16 hours ago by Christina Warren

On Tuesday, Apple made the unusual decision to pre-announce its software lineup for next week’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which includes its long-rumored cloud-based services offering, iCloud.

The Wall Street Journal has reported additional information on the cloud service, including the status of Apple’s agreements with major music labels. iCloud, which Steve Jobs is expected to announce in conjunction with iOS 5 and Mac OS X Lion, is described in part as a digital musical locker, similar to Amazon’s Cloud Player and the new Google Music. The difference, according to the Journal, is that Apple has struck deals with the record labels that will make it easier for users to access their libraries.

Both Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player require users to upload their existing music libraries to the services before content can be streamed or accessed from a secondary machine. Amazon does automatically store new Amazon MP3 purchases in a users Cloud Player library, but any Amazon purchases made before the Cloud Player account was activated need to be uploaded manually.

What Apple will be doing — according to the Wall Street Journal — is what is known as “scan and match.” In essence, a user’s computer or iTunes library will be scanned for song files that are recognized by the music labels. Then, rather than uploading those files to a server, users will gain access to those tracks or albums from other compatible devices.

Whether or not iCloud’s scan and match feature will extend beyond files purchased from the iTunes Music Store isn’t clear, but we have a hunch that users will have the ability to instantly access all of their past iTunes music purchases using the service.

Apple certainly has the ability to give users access to the entirity of their iTunes Music accounts. About two years ago, I accidentally deleted my entire iTunes music library. After contacting Apple, I was granted the opportunity to download every song or music video I had ever purchased from the iTunes Music Store in one gigantic download. The resulting download was more than 25GB in size and more than 2600 files. Still, every song, free single of the week and special edition iTunes bonus track that I had ever purchased was given back to me.

Frankly, if Apple could offer that kind of access from a web browser, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV, we think the company could be onto something.

Music lockers are a good idea but are often marred by the reality that uploading every album you have to the cloud is a long, unpleasant process. If Apple wanted to sweeten the pot even more, it could make iTunes playlists syncable with the cloud and even sharable, Spotify style, with friends.

The Wall Street Journal says that Apple has signed agreements with three of the four major record labels. It is expected to finalize its agreement with Universal Music Group later this week.

If Apple is able to rollout a truly cloud-based iTunes experience to users, it would give the company a huge advantage in the emerging space. iTunes is the number one music retailer in the world; having instant access to past purchases would only solidify that lead.

[Animo]

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has submitted plans to build a new 150-acre campus in Cupertino, California, saying it could create “the best office building in the world.”

Jobs presented the concept of the new campus yesterday at Cupertino City Hall.

Jobs said Apple's current headquarters, 1 Infinite Loop, only holds 2,800 people and as the company hires 12,000 employees, Apple has been forced to rent buildings in its radius. As a result, the company needs another building to augment this but still wishes to remain in Cupertino.

The planned 150-acre campus will be located on the original home of HP’s computer systems division.

Apple bosses have hired who they believe are the “best architects in the world” to create the campus and have used the experience they’ve gained when designing their retail outlets worldwide.

The four-storey headquarters will be a circular loop with a courtyard in the middle, with curved glass all the way around it.

”It’s a little like a spaceship landed,” said Jobs.

Apple will make the campus 80pc landscape and will enlist the help of a senior arborist from Stanford to plant more indigenous trees, including apricot trees.

Laura O'Brien

[Animo]

By Matthew Wilson
Cupertino Courier
Posted: 06/08/2011 06:50:03 AM PDT
Updated: 06/08/2011 08:16:20 AM PDT

Jobs unveiled plans and renderings for a campus that will have a decidedly lush and space-age look. The new home to Apple will feature a single four-story, circular building that will house about 12,000 employees. The building will have a heavily landscaped center.

"It's a little like a spaceship landed,'' Jobs told the council. "There is not a single straight piece of glass in this building. I think we do have a shot at building the best office building in the world. I really do think architecture students will come here to see this, I think it can be that good."

The campus will look much greener than the current HP campus. Jobs said about 20 percent of the property is landscaped while the rest is covered by buildings or asphalt. He said once Apple is done, most of the parking will be underground and 80 percent of the area will be landscaped. He said there are currently 3,700 trees on the property, and the company plans to almost double the number and include some apricot orchards like those that were once on the property.

Jobs told the city Apple hopes to break ground next year and move in 2015. He said the Infinite Loop campus will continue to house about 2,600 Apple employees.

The new campus will have its own natural-gas-fired energy center as its main power source. It will also have an auditorium for major presentations, a research and development facility and cafe.

[JoshuaSantos]

Wow, that's a pretty amazing design. I think I like the previous mockups with the glass ceiling and PRT system more, but for a design that can realistically be built soon, that is incredible.

Originally Posted by Animo

[Animo]

Yup, it is indeed awesome! I am going to ask a friend of mine who works for Apple to give me a tour of Apple HQ.

[HKkid]

I appreciate the simplicity of a simple package. The design seems to go along with the ideas behind Apple's industrial design (emphasis on the seems). Very little has been shared on the design, especially the interior arrangement. So the following criticism is merely premature speculation. I just hope the designers didn't look at this as merely another one of Apple's industrial designs. Architecture is more complicated and has deeper design needs than covering wires and circuits in simple monolithic outer casings. I'm certainly glad they didn't make it look like a macbook, but I really don't see how this design could embody an interconnected woven network of engineers and designers. The reality is that a circle is a bent line which means it is really a linear design with some shortcuts through an outdoor courtyard. Hmm. Could work. I am truly curious....
That said, it's been done before as a symbol of power, security and introversion.
and by the way...the first and third images in the posting by Animo are not designs by Norman Foster. Try AS+GG Architecture in Chicago.

[desertpunk]

Will the Apple Headquarters flash the Batsignal at their grand opening?

[xThomasTroublex]

Originally Posted by HKkid

I appreciate the simplicity of a simple package. The design seems to go along with the ideas behind Apple's industrial design (emphasis on the seems). Very little has been shared on the design, especially the interior arrangement. So the following criticism is merely premature speculation. I just hope the designers didn't look at this as merely another one of Apple's industrial designs. Architecture is more complicated and has deeper design needs than covering wires and circuits in simple monolithic outer casings. I'm certainly glad they didn't make it look like a macbook, but I really don't see how this design could embody an interconnected woven network of engineers and designers. The reality is that a circle is a bent line which means it is really a linear design with some shortcuts through an outdoor courtyard. Hmm. Could work. I am truly curious....
That said, it's been done before as a symbol of power, security and introversion.
and by the way...the first and third images in the posting by Animo are not designs by Norman Foster. Try AS+GG Architecture in Chicago.

The design is actually based on the same concept as the current Apple HQ/Street Address (Infinite Loop) -

An infinite loop is a sequence of instructions in a computer program which loops endlessly

I worked for Apple for a number of years. The current campus is nice and the new one just looks like a bigger, rounder version. IMO, nothing ground breaking. Would have been pretty cool had Apple's original plan to have IM Pei design a San Jose campus worked out.

[èđđeůx]

I honestly prefer Foster's design.

[Þróndeimr]

Some high resolution renderings can be found in this thread.


Illustration by Foster + Partners

[desertpunk]

Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO of Apple.

[desertpunk]

R.I.P Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011





.

[desertpunk]

Wired

Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011
By Wired Staff October 5, 2011



Steven Paul Jobs, co-founder, chairman and former chief executive of Apple Inc., passed away Wednesday.

A visionary inventor and entrepreneur, it would be impossible to overstate Steve Jobs’ impact on technology and how we use it. Apple’s mercurial, mysterious leader did more than reshape his entire industry: he completely changed how we interact with technology. He made gadgets easy to use, gorgeous to behold and essential to own. He made things we absolutely wanted, long before we even knew we wanted them. Jobs’ utter dedication to how people think, touch, feel and interact with machines dictated even the smallest detail of the computers Apple built and the software it wrote.

Jobs was born in San Francisco on Feb. 24, 1955, and adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California. He was a techie from a young age, often sitting in on lectures at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto while attending Homestead High School in Cupertino. He eventually landed a summer job there, working alongside Steve Wozniak.

Jobs enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Ore. in 1972, but dropped out after six months – he later said he “didn’t see the value in it.” He eventually returned home to California. He got a job at Atari, renewed his friendship with Wozniak and started hanging out with the Homebrew Computer Club. After trekking to India in 1974 — a trip he, like so many others, made to find enlightenment – Jobs returned home and looked up Woz.

The two of them launched Apple in 1976. Their first project, the Apple I, wasn’t much to look at — just an assembled circuit board. Anyone who bought it had to add the case and keyboard. But it was enough for Jobs to convince Mike Markkula, a semi-retired Intel engineer and product marketing manager, that personal computing was the future. Markkula invested $250,000 in the fledgling enterprise.

The Apple I begat the Apple II in 1977. It was the first successful mass-market computer, and easy to use, too. That would become a hallmark of Apple under Jobs.

The Apple II had a huge impact on the tech business, but cheaper alternatives, like the Commodore 64 and the VIC-20, quickly eroded Apple’s market share. IBM’s open PC platform eventually won out over Apple’s closed approach, and the die was cast. The PC dominated the market.

Still, Apple was by any measure a success. By the time Jobs was 25 in 1980, he was worth more than $100 million. Not that it mattered to him.

“It wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money,” he once said.

Apple once again shook up the industry with the Macintosh, announced in 1984 with a now-iconic Super Bowl ad challenging IBM. The Mac was a revolutionary step forward for personal computing — the first mass market computer to use a mouse-driven, user-friendly graphical interface. It was influenced by – critics would argue lifted from — technology Jobs saw a few years earlier at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. It irreversibly changed how we interact with computers.

But then Jobs fell from grace. One year after the Mac’s introduction, Jobs was fired in a power struggle with CEO John Sculley. Jobs was devastated. He felt he’d let those who came before him – pioneers like David Packard and Bob Noyce – down, and he wanted to apologize.

“It was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the Valley,” he admitted in a 2005 speech.

But Jobs realized he loved what he did, and wanted to keep doing it. So he founded NeXT, a computer company, and a computer animation outfit that he renamed Pixar. As for Apple, it faltered in his absence. The company’s stock plummeted 68 percent, pushing Apple to the brink of bankruptcy.

But in 1996, Apple purchased NeXT and Jobs returned to the company he founded. It wasn’t long before he was once again back at the helm, and Apple’s ascent began.

One of Jobs’ first moves was to make peace with arch-rival Microsoft. That led to a $150 million investment from Microsoft, breathing new life into the moribund Apple. Jobs was once again firmly in control, and this time he would make sure he didn’t lose it.

He ran Apple with a firm hand, enforcing a policy of secrecy, while instilling an unrivaled dedication to design and an unwavering commitment to quality. These things mattered so deeply to Jobs that he became a micromanager, one said to have put as much thought into the boxes holding Apple’s products as the products themselves.

Apple’s incredible string of hits started with the iMac and continued with iTunes and the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007 and 2010’s iPad. There were some misses along the way – Mobile Me and Apple TV – but Jobs, working with lieutenants like Tim Cook, made Apple one of the biggest companies in the world.

Jobs had always been the public face of Apple, but he began retreating from the spotlight in 2004 when doctors diagnosed him with pancreatic cancer. It was a rare form of the disease, one that could be treated, and Jobs survived. His health, though, continued to deteriorate. His liver failed in 2009, and Jobs took a six-month medical leave. He returned, but was rarely seen. He announced he was resigning as CEO in August, and Tim Cook replaced him as the head the company.

[...]