Spying drone sneaks a look at Apple's nearly complete spaceship campus
Cupertino, California's most famous corporate resident hopes to move into its ambitious new home next year, and construction looks to be progressing on schedule.
- Finalist for the Nesta Tipping Point prize and a degree in broadcast journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
It's been a few years since we began to get sneak peeks behind the scenes of the construction at Apple's massive new UFO-shaped Campus 2. The latest drone's eye view of the site reveals the project appears to be nearing completion.
The circular main building is seen taking shape, as are other parts of the campus, including separate research and design facilities, a huge 100,000-square-foot employee fitness center and a solar-panel-topped 11,000-car parking garage. Between all those panels and some fuel cells, the campus is essentially its own 20-megawatt power plant. That's enough to power the equivalent of over 3,000 homes, and Apple has said it plans to sell off some of those electrons.
One of the more bizarre features of the campus at the moment is a massive mountain of dirt leftover from construction that the video, posted by drone pilot Matthew Roberts, says will be reused for landscaping. Roberts has been filming these videos on a regular basis for the past few years.
While there's still plenty of work to go to finish the facility, the infrastructure looks to be largely in place, including tunnels and a new auditorium taking shape for future product launches and who knows what else. Perhaps performances by high-profile Apple employees like Dr. Dre and Trent Reznor? The company has said it hopes to move in sometime next year.