Earlier this week, satellite footage highlighted the
progress Apple has made in construction on Apple Park, showing the new campus
go from skeleton form to near completion. Now, Duncan Sinfield is back with his
newest drone footage, offering our clearest look yet at Steve Jobs Theater.
The drone footage takes us on another sunset flight around
Apple Park, showcasing the main campus, Steve Jobs Theater, the research and
development centers, and surrounding area. The video opens with some beautiful
flyover footage of the main spaceship campus, showing work continue on the
greenery within and around the ring. From there, we’re taken the adjacent Steve
Jobs Theater.
Steve Jobs Theater features a 1000-seat below ground
auditorium, and this footage gives us the clearest look yet at the above ground
lobby. As you can see in the video, the lobby features floor-t0-ceiling windows
and Apple’s traditional all-white design. The company is still working on
applying final touches to the interior of the building.
Throughout the construction of Apple Park, we’ve seen a
variety of different drone flyover videos that give us a clear look at the
campus and its progression. Apple first started moving employees into Apple
Park back in April, though in very limited fashion. Recent drone footage has
shown Apple continue construction on the interior, with areas such as the cafe,
while work also continues on the landscaping outside. Apple has also recently
started hiring Visitor Center staff in preparation of the official opening of
the new campus.
Watch the latest done video below and keep up with
everything we know about Apple Park in our continually updated guide. What do
you think of the newest footage?
Apple's biggest
introduction on Tuesday: Apple Park
Apple is expected to unveil its largest array of new product
introductions ever, ranging from iPhone 8—and a premium new iPhone X—to a new
4K/HDR Apple TV, new Apple Watch Series 3, revamped AirPods and the company's
new HomePod appliance—as well as its new Apple Park campus. Here's why it all
matters—starting with the location.
Steve Jobs Theater at
Apple Park
Certainly the "largest" new unveiling of the event
will be Apple's new Campus 2, now officially branded as Apple Park—a sprawling
green campus centered around a futuristic "infinite loop" Ring and
surrounded by satellite Phase 2 buildings that are both beautiful and
minimalistically functional for research and design over the coming decades.
If Apple has been a force to be reckoned with while it
operates out of a drab headquarters straight out of the dystopian suburbia of
Office Space, a complex and its surrounding sprawl that's been overutilized
through the last decade of Apple's intense growth and was originally built back
in the mid 1990s—back when Apple Computer built a few million Macs per year and
struggled to license its reference designs for handheld Newton MessagePad
tablets that nobody wanted—imagine what will come out of these modern new
facilities designed to inspire creativity and integration among teams.
The Apple Park name is an apparent homage to PARC, Silicon
Valley's Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where a variety of advanced computing
ideas originated in the 1970s before being turned into real products by Apple
(the original Mac), Adobe (PostScript), Cisco (Ethernet), Microsoft (Word) and
many others.
Apple's current style of R&D is far more immediate and
practical than the academic experimentation of Xerox PARC, or for that matter
the former Advanced Technology Group that Apple itself ran into the late 90s,
or Microsoft Research or Google X or other labs that invent technology that
rarely escapes to see any practical implementation in the real world.
A Theater named for
the Showman
Tuesday's event is specifically being held within the
subterranean Steve Jobs Theater, pictured below while it was still an excavated
hole two years ago, back in the summer of 2015.
The new venue is named in recognition of the man who not
only co-founded Apple, but led the development and commercialization of PARC
technologies that became the Macintosh in 1984; built the team that created the
futuristic NeXT platform in the 1990s that became the basis of macOS X and iOS
in the 2000s; resuscitated the culture of Apple with blockbuster,
industry-shifting products ranging from iMac to iPod to iPhone and iPad, as
well as ambitious software projects ranging from Pro Apps to iCloud; and
presented plans for the new campus at his last public appearance prior to his
passing in 2011.
What we already know about the Steve Jobs Theater is that it
is meticulously designed to detail and demonstrate new technology product
introductions—not just these being shown next week for 2017, but for decades
into the future. It's a major capital investment in Apple's theatrical Event
model that has worked to introduce a string of hits for the company over the
last twenty years.
Rather than renting an arena or a trade show booth and
throwing up massive banners shouting about how innovative their new catalog of
SKUs or licensing initiatives are—in the model of Samsung, Microsoft or HP—or
simply throwing a symposium party in a nearby outdoor venue like Google IO,
Apple's Steve Jobs Theater is designed to perpetuate the cyclical model of new
dramatic technology introductions in the form of real, desirable products
available for immediate sale.
And, presumably, Apple will also be able to use the theater
across the rest of the year to welcome shareholders and train employees in the
model of Apple University.
Apple Park as a
currency of competence
One more thing about the new Apple Park: its purported $5
billion price tag is roughly the same size as the conflagration caused by
Samsung rushing a defective product to market last fall, mishandling its safety
recall, and then burning down a series of related strategic plans and
partnerships, including the Facebook/Oculus deal for Gear VR that tied to the
Galaxy Note 7 bonfire.
Apple Park is not only a monument to the meticulous
competency of Apple as a company, but also serves as reminder of the massive
destructions and waste of capital at the hands of Samsung and other rivals of
Apple's iOS.
Using Apple Park as a $5 billion currency of competence, we
can debit Google with three negative Apple Parks worth of incompetence and lost
opportunity just for its failed acquisitions of Motorola and Nest; chalk up
another three negative Apple Parks in Microsoft's bungled acquisitions of
aQuantive and Nokia, write off almost 30 negative Apple Parks for BlackBerry's
collapse from its peak 2008 valuation, and something around negative 48 Apple
Parks worth of Nokia's collapse since iPhone was unveiled.
On the other hand, Apple itself now sits on 30 Apple Park's
worth of liquid capital (subtracting its debt holdings), and the company brings
in enough cash flow to fund another two Apple Parks about every three months.
So far, we've gotten regular looks at Apple Park and the
Steve Jobs Theater via drone flyovers and tweeted photos, just as we've always
seen leaks of case design photos, screen shots of upcoming iOS features and
leaks of codenames and product packaging.
Many of the leaks are already known facts or strongly
speculated well in advance based on Apple's previous acquisitions and
investments. All the same, every Apple Event also carries new surprises and
details that were kept tight secrets, and this Tuesday should reveal plenty new
things about known products and initiatives, including the brand-new venue
itself.
