Apple's new $5 billion headquarters is about to open — 35 things worth knowing

Eleven years after Apple first began planning it, the $5 billion Apple Park opens in April.

The last product Steve Jobs ever unveiled, two years late, is finally about to ship.

On June 7, 2011, Jobs stood up at a meeting of the Cupertino City Council and laid out Apple's plan for a new headquarters. The building, he said, would look "a little like a spaceship landed." Jobs took part in designing and pushing it through himself.

You can see in the video of that day that Jobs was already gaunt and hoarse. It was the last public speech he ever gave. Less than four months later, on October 5, he died.

Five and a half years on, Apple unveiled Jobs's last "new product" this past Thursday: a headquarters named Apple Park, which opens to employees this April.

In memory of the founder, the building used for events carries his name outright: the Steve Jobs Theater.

For a corporate headquarters, this one is extraordinarily large and extraordinarily expensive. It is also the first Apple "product" since 1997 to be announced publicly and then miss its date. The second was probably last year's AirPods.

The delay has everything to do with how Apple went about building it.

We have gathered 35 facts about Apple Park to walk you through the details of this behemoth, and the story behind it.

Apple's official video

This is the most expensive corporate headquarters on Earth

1. Apple Park is one giant ring.

The courtyard inside the ring is a plaza. The building occupies 708,000 square meters of land in all. It has only four floors, a total floor area of 260,000 square meters, and room for 12,000 employees.

How big is that? John Martellaro of Mac Observer compared it to the Pentagon and a few other things.

2. The original plan was not this big.

In 2006, when the new headquarters was still only an idea, Apple bought 200,000 square meters of land, part of HP's old campus. Then in 2010 HP decided to move out altogether, and Apple bought another 400,000 square meters. That is how the big ring came about.

3. This is also where Jobs had his first job.

The whole new Apple campus stands on the site of HP's old office buildings. As it happens, Jobs's first summer job, at the age of 12, was right here.

In February 2014, Apple blew up all 24 of the old HP buildings, which pushed the buildable area up in one stroke to today's 2.8 million square feet.

4. It sits right next door to the old campus.

Apple's current headquarters has been in use since 1993, and in 1997 its address was changed to 1 Infinite Loop. Infinite Loop is a real street name, and the building at the front gate really is number 1. Because Apple owned the entire plot, Apple employees voted on the street name themselves. The hard-drive maker Seagate did much the same: its headquarters sits on a street called 100 Disk Drive.

The new Apple Park is about a kilometer from the current headquarters, at 19111 Pruneridge Avenue. Whether that address will change the way the old one did is anyone's guess.

5. It uses the land far better than the old campus does.

The new headquarters actually covers less ground with buildings than the current one, yet offers more office space.

That is because Apple put most of the parking underground. There is room for more cars, and you see fewer of them.

6. The whole campus cost about $5 billion.

The figure Bloomberg reported in 2013 was $5 billion. Asked about that number in a television interview, current CEO Tim Cook said it was roughly right.

Reuters, citing a former construction manager, reported that the interior finishing of the main building alone ate up $1 billion.

This is the most expensive corporate headquarters in the world. For comparison: the new World Trade Center complex in New York cost $3.9 billion; Porsche's new North American headquarters, finished in 2015, cost $100 million. Five billion dollars is about half a year's total profit at Alibaba or Facebook. It is less than a third of what Apple earned in the fourth quarter of 2016.

The design came from Apple's industrial design team and the architect Norman Foster

7. The design team brought in outside brains, but Jobs and Apple still led it.

Apple Park is the work of Jobs, the Apple industrial design team under Jony Ive, and the architecture firm Foster + Partners.

Norman Foster has been close to Apple for years; the latest generation of Apple Store retail design is his work too.

Ive, who has had a hand in almost every Apple product, played a decisive part in designing the building, down to the chairs and tables inside it.

8. The inspiration, or the ideal, behind Apple Park goes back to Jobs's childhood.

The spaceship shape, the curved glass, the low floors, the abundance of green: all of it Jobs asked for.

His teenage years are bound up in the building as well. Stanford University was not far from where he grew up, and the campus's Main Quad had the design elements he wanted: an open clearing holding Rodin sculptures, Khufu Tower and other pieces of the university's history. Jobs once gave a commencement speech there. "Follow your heart" came out of that day.

9. The specific design borrows from London's garden squares.

Foster put more than 70 people on the Apple building, and they took the ring structure of London's squares as their model: buildings arranged around a circle with the middle left open, which keeps the building compact and still frees up a large clearing.

10. It is also the kind of megastructure Foster is very good at.

Foster has said a building must be "big enough." Among his past works, Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital Airport, the HSBC headquarters tower in Hong Kong and London's Imperial War Museum are all enormous.

In a 2014 interview with Architectural Record, Foster said his taste for big buildings comes down to economics: a large building designed as a whole saves a great deal of exterior wall material.

Big buildings also leave more room for interesting structure. You can see the thought Foster puts into each one — the gherkin form of a museum, or the tilted oval of London's City Hall.

11. Beyond the spaceship itself, Apple Park has a string of other facilities.

Outside the giant ring, Apple has a cafeteria, a fitness center and parking for employees. As at the previous generation of Apple headquarters, tens of thousands of employees will eat mainly at one cafeteria.

That cafeteria covers 5,500 square meters. If Apple keeps to its usual practice, the cooks and servers will all be Apple employees, not outsourced as they are at most companies.

In the open ground at the center of the ring there is a separate building as well: a 1,000-seat auditorium, the one named after Jobs.

Outside the ring there is also a 200-square-meter visitor center with a café and an Apple Store selling souvenirs. The other freestanding buildings are the parking structure, the R&D center and the athletic facilities.

A "new product" two years late

12. Apple Park was first meant to be finished in 2015.

• 2006: Jobs told the Cupertino City Council that Apple had bought nine adjacent buildings for a second headquarters.
• 2011: Apple filed its application with the city of Cupertino, and Jobs attended a city council meeting.
• 2013: The city approved the project.
• 2013: Groundbreaking slipped by a year, with completion now planned for 2016.
• 2016: Apple pushed the opening back again, to "spring 2017."
• 2017: Move-in set for April.

13. Construction took nearly four years.

On November 20, 2013, two years after Jobs's death, Apple received a full building permit.

Work began in 2014. Two weeks in, the central ring was moving fast and the parking structure beside the highway had been started. Apple Insider documented those early weeks: you can make out the ring and the first outline of the Jobs Theater.

In June 2015, Apple changed contractors.

The contractors Skanska and DPR had fallen behind schedule and costs had climbed steeply, so Apple ended the relationship. By then Skanska had finished the main structure and roof of Apple's "spaceship"; the setback cost the Swedish firm about $800 million and put Apple's schedule back by nearly a year.

The replacements were Rudolph & Sletten Inc., from Silicon Valley, and Holder Construction, based in Atlanta.

From 2016 the pace picked up. Matthew Roberts, a popular video blogger, started flying a drone over Apple's Cupertino site every month from that March, posting the aerial footage on YouTube.

Last March the main structures, the auditorium and sports center among them, were largely finished but not yet topped out, and only a small part of the solar panels had gone down.

By August the curved glass was going up, and the outlying buildings — parking structure, fitness center, auditorium, R&D center — had mostly topped out.

By last October his footage showed one last section of the main building waiting to be topped out, and the roof solar panels 40 percent installed. Landscaping had begun inside the campus, with the first plants moved in, and the 100,000-square-foot fitness center was still going up.

By this February, 70 percent of the solar panels were down and most of the glass was in, a clear change from a year earlier. The courtyard, though, was still a mess: uneven ground covered in construction machinery and mud.

Building it was like building an iPhone

Apple's pursuit of perfect product detail carried straight over into the design of this building.

Reuters tracked down 20 current and former employees who worked on the building this year and got some interesting details out of them. By their account, Apple treated what it called Apple Campus 2 as one enormous iPhone: pipes, glass, elevators, buttons, all held to the standards of hardware design.

14. The roof came from the desert.

In memory of Jobs, Apple named the campus auditorium the Steve Jobs Theater. The 1,000-seat hall will be where Apple launches its products from now on. The largest venue Apple has ever rented, the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, holds 7,000 people, and even an event on the scale of Apple's developer conference could not fill it.

The theater's showpiece is its roof, billed as the largest unsupported carbon-fiber roof in the world. It is made of 44 fan-shaped sections, which had to be assembled and tested in the deserts of Dubai and then shipped back to the United States. Total weight: 80 tons.

15. The parts nobody sees got the same care.

The underside of the ceiling, for instance — the side only a maintenance worker will ever look at — had to be finished like the side that shows. Jobs used to say a good carpenter does not use cheap wood on the back of a cabinet.

16. The manual Apple handed contractors on how to handle wood ran to 30 pages.

17. Apple looked to its own products when designing the building.

The German architect de la Torre says Apple wanted the elevator buttons to look like the Home button on the phone. Apple executives regard the Home button as an ideal size and a standard, the product of years of experiment.

18. Apple decided doors could not have thresholds.

A former construction manager explained why: if an employee walking into the building has to change his stride for a threshold, his mind comes off his work.

19. Apple made a contractor redo the conference room door handles for a year and a half. By the time the work was done, the contractor's project lead had quit.

20. The fire department sat through 15 meetings about the fire safety signs.

Apple thought the standard fire signs were ugly and redesigned every sign in the building to be both useful and in keeping with its minimalist taste. Each design still had to be approved by the fire department. Dirk Mattern, then deputy fire chief of Santa Clara County, met Apple 15 times over it. "I've never spent so much time on fire signage in my life," he said.

21. At handover, not a fingerprint was allowed on the building.

District Council 16, the contractor responsible for the paintwork, says workers could not leave fingerprints on the finished building, so they had to work in gloves.

The hardest part of the whole building: the glass

22. It uses the largest curved glass panels in the world.

The entire circular facade is made of the largest single-piece curved glass panels anywhere. The glass comes from Sedak, a German company Apple has worked with for years.

23. The heaviest single panel weighs 3 tons.

The building needs 3,100 of these single-piece panels, the heaviest of them 3 tons.

All four floors use the same structure, and the perimeter runs more than 1.6 kilometers.

Each curved panel on the outside of the building is large: 14 meters long and 3 meters high. The panels on the inner face, looking onto the central plaza, are 11 meters long.

24. The glass may not be off by more than 0.88 millimeters.

Bending panels this size into curves takes a complicated process. Two sheets of glass are laminated together, then worked at 600 degrees Celsius, then cooled with cold air, and finally heated to 130 degrees in an autoclave to take their curve.

Apple's tolerances are brutal. The best glass available anywhere can be off from its stated dimensions by up to 1/8 inch; Apple allows no more than 1/32 inch, about 0.88 millimeters.

The glass made the job hard enough on its own, but Apple also insisted that no vent or pipe be reflected in it in a way that would spoil the look.

25. Big as they are, some panels move.

Foster says the headquarters will also have four-story-high panels of glass that slide open like doors. Apple's Union Square store in San Francisco already has giant sliding glass doors, 6 by 12.8 meters. The ones at the new headquarters will be twice as tall.

26. Finally, why so much glass?

Beyond the connection to Jobs, this is Ive's own taste. Ive likes to design with glass; his current office is a freestanding room with nothing but glass on all four sides.

Green, green, green

27. The whole roof is covered in solar panels, generating 17 megawatts.

Apple plans to run the building entirely on solar power. Surplus electricity can be held in reserve or sold.

28. Even the water gets used twice.

Apple spent $17.5 million on infrastructure linking the campus to nearby Sunnyvale and to local booster pump stations, laying 4,054 meters of pipe in all. A large recycling system filters non-potable water into reclaimed water for the campus grounds. The same recycled water can also go to Cupertino residents, and amounts to a quarter of the city's total recycled water.

29. Natural ventilation means nine months a year with no air conditioning.

Apple Park does everything it can to ventilate on natural airflow, which is what the giant opening glass doors are for. Apple says the building needs neither cooling nor heating for nine months of the year.

The same idea is at work in the Union Square Apple Store in downtown San Francisco, which has a pair of giant glass doors at the front and another at the back — shut to hold the warmth in when it is cold, open to let the air through when it is hot.

30. Apple hired a Stanford horticulturist to tune the campus ecosystem.

To create an ecosystem inside the campus, Apple hired the Stanford arborist Dave Muffly, who brought in 309 plant species. Plant cover across the campus reaches 80 percent, with 7,000 trees over the central park in the middle of the ring.

31. The trees are not only for looking at. They also feed the cafeteria.

The dominant tree on the Apple campus is oak. Beyond that there are many fruit trees: apple, apricot, olive, persimmon, plum and cherry. Some of the fruit will go to Apple's cafeteria.

Whether or not it has anything to do with the company's name, the apple tree is the second most planted species after the oak.

32. There are 1,000 bicycles for getting around inside.

To make moving around easier, Apple has put 1,000 bicycles on the campus for employees. The giant ring is shaped like a stadium, which makes the central park a good place to run.

33. A lot of thought went into getting people in and around.

Unlike the old campus, where employees' cars fill the lots outside, the new one has a two-level underground garage with 2,000 spaces.

The transport system reaches past the ring as well: Apple has added 20 percent more commuter service, shuttle buses among other things. At least a third of employees should benefit and be able to leave the car at home.

For those who do drive, the way in is an underground tunnel running straight to Apple Park's underground parking.

It is an astonishing building, and not everyone likes it

34. Apple Park drew doubts the moment it was announced.

Most of the criticism aims at the sheer size of Foster's design. The architecture critic at The New Yorker argued that a building this big leaves human scale behind — a building is, after all, a tool — and called Apple's design "the Pentagon of the 21st century."

The city approved the project, but some local residents worried the headquarters would become Cupertino's Taj Mahal: crowds of Apple fans arriving on pilgrimage, and heavy pressure on traffic and the environment.

The criticism has not stopped. Louise Mozingo, professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning at UC Berkeley, argues that joining a giant ring to a central building makes getting around inside harder, and does nothing at all for space efficiency.

The green power, the planting, the intricate design everywhere: Apple Park really is a park. None of it hides the fact that its size is a pursuit of symbolism.

35. Apple's design team may have too much on its hands.

Ive's industrial design team has led the design of every piece of Apple hardware for 20 years.

The team is famously small, a little over 20 people, and it handles the industrial design of every Apple product line. Samsung Electronics, for comparison, has 1,600 industrial designers.

It is also remarkably stable: in the 20 years since 1996, seven people have left, four of them by dying.

But now, on top of the four main product lines — phones, watches, tablets, computers — they have more to worry about: cars, Apple Stores, Apple Park. They have even put out a design book that costs several thousand yuan, and all the design in the new generation of Apple stores, down to the planters the trees grow in.

Apple Park is obviously not these designers' main job, but going by the details the builders describe, they probably spent a fair share of their biweekly all-hands brainstorming sessions talking about their own future office.

There are already fairly reliable reports that several Mac models went without updates, or shipped compromised, late last year simply because they could not get enough design resources.

One wonders whether, once they move in, Ive will have more time for products.

Cover image from Apple