A glimpse of the ‘mother ship’
On a recent trip to California, I went to Cupertino to get a glimpse of Apple’s immense $5 billion new headquarters. The site is officially christened Apple Park, but the huge circular main building is nicknamed the mother ship or the spaceship. The Ring’s diameter exceeds that of the Pentagon or the Empire State Building lying on its side and it is one mile in circumference. The interior and exterior walls of the building are curved glass and the floors and ceilings of the three underground and four aboveground levels consists of 4,300 hollow concrete slabs that house the ventilation system that allows the building to “breathe.”
The building’s 2.8 million square feet will house 12,000 employees who began arriving in April. The campus is powered 100 percent by renewable energy and has one of the largest on-site solar installations in the world.
Igot only a glimpse of the mammoth building because the site is shielded from surrounding roads by trees and earth berms, a landscaping expression of Apple’s secrecy.The middle of the Ring is a 30-acr epark, with fruit trees and winding pathways, inspired by the orchards of California, part of the total of 9,000 trees on the grounds.
The building has seven cafes, the main one seating 3,000. Opening that cafe to the outside are huge sliding glass doors, 85 feet by 54 feet and weighing 440,000 pounds each. The equipment to open them is underground to control the noise.
To insure that an earthquake doesn’t produce a $5 billion pile of rubble, the Ring is mounted on huge steel base isolators that ensure the building can move up to 4.5 feet in any direction.
There are other buildings on the campus, including the Steve Jobs Theater. But Mr. Jobs’ influence is everywhere, having worked on the building for the last two years of his life.
One more thing. Not to be outdone, Google received its first approval while I was in San Jose last week for a bold plan to remake the downtown into a massive, transit-
centered Google village with up to 20,000 new jobs, said the local paper, The Mercury News.
Yay FCC. TechMan has complained about the FCC’s inaction on robocalls. Well, last week it did something — proposed a $120 million fine against Adrian Abramovich, a Miami man accused of making 96 million robocalls in three months, many to people on the National Do Not Call Registry, according to maminewtimes.com,
Boo FCC. Speaking of the FCC, lots of large and small websites are signing on to the Internet-Wide Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality on July 12 to protest the government’s plan to revoke net neutrality rules. Plans are still being made for what the protest will look like, says battleforthenet.com.
Insurance payout. Anthem Inc, the largest U.S. health insurance company, has agreed to settle litigation over hacking in 2015 that compromised about 79 million people's personal information for $115 million, the largest settlement ever for a data breach, said reuters.com.
Food from the sky. Now that Amazon has bought Whole Foods, how long will it be before drones start dropping arugula at your house?
Send comments, contributions, corrections and condemnations to pgtechtexts@gmail.com.