Drone Footage of Apple's Mothership HQ Is Mesmerizing
The glistening $5 billion circular structure looks like a Star Wars set right outside suburbia.
Soon, Apple’s new “Mothership” Headquarters will stand gently amid green trees that bake in the California sun, and look like an Orwellian monument to the empire that Steve Jobs built in Cupertino, California.
That’s at least the impression we get from watching some drone footage of the complex uploaded to YouTube today, which unfortunately got taken down only after a couple of hours … though not before we grabbed gifs of the enormous, $5 billion complex in its latest phase of construction, with its bare pieces of concrete sprawling circularly around heaps of raw materials, truck beds, and machinery. The overwhelming impression it conveys is of a see-it-from-space manmade feature, a Pentagon in the round.
An epic zoom-out from the facility captures the size and scale of the entire campus, which is set to reach 176 acres, larger than 230 football fields, by the time it’s complete.
Right now the Mothership looks more like the beginnings of a new civilization bleeding out from the fringes of suburbia than an office building, which is actually what it will be once staff starts moving in at the end of 2016.
Here you can see the Drone zipping over the site, careening through cranes before stopping in front other long, slender Apple facilities.
Apple Campus 2 is slated to be the primary workplace of 13,000 employees, all of whom will surely struggle to find decent parking if they commute via self-driving car or some other highfalutin means of transportation.
Like any longterm development of moderate significance taking place in Silicon Valley, the entire construction process of Apple Campus 2 has been documented via the high-definition cameras of high-flying drones.
Video from last May makes the site look like a bomb-ravaged wasteland, with bare stretches of steel and concrete primed to form the base of the Mothership:
But video uploaded to YouTube last August shows the circle half complete. It is a Mothership almost there:
Renderings of the eventual campus frame the facility as glimmering and blanketed by reams of golden sunlight.
Let’s hope it lives up to all the hype, and that Apple offers fully catered tours of the premises.
