The Crazy Details About How Apple Is Going To Construct Its $5 Billion Spaceship HQ
Peter Burrows at Bloomberg Businessweek has new details on the construction of the building. It may not have been an Apple product like the iPhone or the iPad, but it still got the same treatment from Jobs’ obsessive eye for detail.
Here’s a sample of Jobs’ specifications:
- Burrows says, “Jobs wanted no seam, gap, or paintbrush stroke showing.”
- He wanted everything “polished to a supernatural smoothness.”
- Wood used inside the building is to come from a specific type of maple tree, and it can only be “heartwood,” which is the wood from the center of the tree.
- It will have six-square kilometers of bent glass, which will be bent at a factory in Germany, then shipped to California. The company doing the glass had to develop new machines for making it.
- Apple will pre-build bathrooms and cubicle banks then have them driven to the office and installed. This saves time and allows the construction to be more exact.
- Jobs didn’t want concrete floors, he wanted “a stone-infused alternative such as terrazzo, buffed to a sheen normally reserved for museums and high-end residences,” says Burrows.
- Jobs also wanted the seams where walls met to be 1/32 of an inch across, whereas the standard for construction is 1/8 of inch.
- He wanted the ceiling to be polished concrete instead of sound absorbing material. Apple also has a very specific plan for the concrete ceiling. It wants to pour ceiling molds on the ground, then lift it to the ceiling, an approach that is far more expensive.
Tesla Is The New Apple
Steven Johnson on the impending electric car revolution being led by Tesla:
And if that’s the case, then the automobile industry will go through exactly what the computer and software world went through with the rise of the PC, the Web, and the mobile revolutions. Smaller companies that bet heavily on the new paradigm will become dominant in an amazingly short amount of time; behemoths who cling to the old models will swiftly become afterthoughts. The EV revolution will be like Hemingway’s classic line about going broke: it will happen gradually, then all of a sudden.
Agreed. This is going to happen sooner than most people think.
[via Daring Fireball]
The full post is worth reading.
"Tech firms, certainly, appear to be major consumers of ethnographic research. “Technology companies as a whole are in danger of being more disconnected from their customers than other companies,” says Ken Anderson, an ethnographer at Intel. Tech designers succumb to the illusion that their users are all engineers. “Our mind-set is that people are really just like us, and they’re really not,” Anderson says. Ethnography helps teach the techie types to understand those consumers who “aren’t living and breathing the technology” the way an Intel engineer might. (A curious exception to this cautious embrace of ethnographic methods is Apple, whose late co-founder, Steve Jobs, trusted his designers—and especially himself—more than he trusted consumers or researchers. “It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want,” he famously said.)"
“PCs are going to be like trucks"
Steve Jobs in 2010:
“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farms. Cars became more popular as cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic transmission became popular.
PCs are going to be like trucks. They are still going to be around…they are going to be one out of x people…
When I am going to write that 35-page analyst report, I am going to want my Bluetooth keyboard. That’s 1 percent of the time. The software will get more powerful. I think your vision would have to be pretty short to think these can’t grow into machines that can do more things, like editing video, graphic arts, productivity. You can imagine all of these content creation possibilities on these kind of things. Time takes care of lots of these things.”
This year, about five times as many smartphones will be shipped versus PCs, and tablets will surpass PCs for the first time. According to Jobs, the right way to look at this isn’t that mobile devices are creating a new market. It’s that mobile devices are relegating PCs to special-purpose, mostly industrial devices.
Meanwhile, Amazon’s online-only approach is proving to also be a hit with consumers when it comes to trust: it got “nearly 100%” positive ratings on all questions related to trust. “More than 50 percent of respondents also recall discussing Amazon with friends and family in the past year, and nearly 100 percent of these conversations were positive,” Harris writes.
Apple Stores top Tiffany’s in sales per square foot, again
It is likely that there is no retail outlet in the world that generates as much cash per square foot than an Apple Store.
Disruptions: Will Apple Be the First to Break $1 Trillion? - NYTimes.com
If Apple continues on its current trajectory, something remarkable might happen on April 9, 2015, at around 11 a.m.
That is, statisticians and investors I’ve spoken with say, a conservative estimate of when Apple could become the first company ever to be valued at $1 trillion. (Yes, you read that correctly: the number one, followed by 12 zeros.)
Other analysts are making even more aggressive estimates for the company’s value, which, as of Friday, was $656 billion. Those people put the trillion-dollar mark at less than a year from now: Aug. 16, 2013.
…“Apple has 435 million customers based on the number of credit cards in iTunes. That’s 6 percent of the world’s population. It’s not a stretch to say it can get to 10 or 12 percent of the world’s population.” (Before we go any further, stop and reflect on the power that gives Apple.)
Even if Apple didn’t enter any new product categories, it could reach $1 trillion by doubling its sales. That’s hard for a big company, but in many respects, it is already happening.
Apple Becomes Most Valuable Publicly-Traded Stock Ever
Milestones for Apple’s stock are falling rapidly in recent days, with another strong performance today pushing Apple past Microsoft for the title of most valuable publicly-trade stock ever, a distinction Microsoft has held since December 1999. Microsoft’s market capitalization peaked on December 30, 1999, reaching an intraday high of $119.94 per share.
Apple’s most recent quarterly filing listed 937,406,000 outstanding shares as of July 13, 2012, and with the company’s stock price hitting $660.73 today, its market capitalization reached $619.37 billion.
…In inflation-adjusted terms, Microsoft’s $618.89 market capitalization in December 1999 would be equivalent to roughly $842.5 billion in today’s dollars.
Worst Apple product ever? Probably
In 1986, Apple had released an entire collection of clothes. And if you think they were cool and sleek and minimalistic, well put that thought out of your mind. They were horrid and garish.
