“Apple is putting the finishing touches on its massive ‘spaceship’ campus, which is already in use,” Meghann Farnsworth reports for Recode.
“The huge, $5 billion circular structure has been impressive to watch get built,” Farnsworth reports. “The campus is 175 acres in total and will eventually house around 12,000 Apple employees.”
“Here’s a look at a year’s worth of actual building from this epic campus, cut down to one minute,” Farnsworth reports. “Thanks to videographer Matthew Roberts of Maverick Media Productions for the footage.”
Check out the video here.
MacDailyNews Take: Fun fact: The project cost initially was estimated at $500 million.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
I don’t believe the new campus was ever estimated to cost $500 million, or anywhere near that low.
If you just think for 5 seconds about the amount of land involved, the amount of square footage they are building (in multiple buildings, the underground theaters, the parking structures, etc.
Just those basic items alone would easily put the budget at $2 billion +.
And all of that is before you start putting things in like the world’s largest pieces of glass that required brand new furnaces to manufacture, custom door handles everywhere, a breathable building (reduces A/C), etc.
Apple knew this was going to cost billions. Parroting a ridiculous estimate like $500 million is just silly, and makes MDN sounds pretty stupid.
If you told me the estimate for landscaping, roads, pathways, etc was $500 million, I might believe that.
MDN’s “fun fact” needs a citation. I don’t recall ever seeing such an estimate for the spaceship.
Thanks for the citation, MDN, but neither of your citation’s source citations mentions anything remotely close to your “fun fact.” One of them (2013, Bloomberg) stated, “Since 2011, the budget for Apple’s Campus 2 has ballooned from less than $3 billion to nearly $5 billion” and even that was based on anonymous sources.
Thought this would be a time-lapse shot from a stationary location which would be a lot more fun. Dang.
I also hoped it would be a “ground-up” video, starting with the digging of the original circle. This was only the last part of the construction.
$500 million might have been the ORIGINAL price tag, back when Apple was just developing the 75 acres they owned. But when they bought the adjoining 100 acres from HP, they entire scale of the project changed.
Could they have saved two billion dollars by building a conventional office park? Sure. Could they have saved a billion by settling for off-the-shelf components? Yes. But then, it wouldn’t be Apple.
Amazing how progress and planning can be achieved by time lapse photography.
The video isn’t actually a time lapse, it’s dozens of cuts from different angles, somewhat nauseating.