First look at the site of Apple's $1 billion campus in Austin, Texas
Apple on Thursday revealed plans to build a second, $1 billion campus in Austin, spanning 133 acres and housing 5,000 workers. AppleInsider took a look at the site as it exists today, and gives you a brief primer on the area.
The planned build site is at the corner of Dallas Drive and West Parmer Lane, roughly a mile away from Apple's current Austin campus, also on Parmer. Parmer is a major thoroughfare in the city -- while traffic was relatively light when AppleInsider visited on Thursday morning, the road is often choked with traffic during rush hour in part because of Apple's existing campus, which employs thousands of people for operations work and AppleCare among other things.
The Dallas/Parmer intersection. The main entrance will actually be slightly further east on Parmer.
The immediate area is surrounded mostly by suburbs. Some points of interest though are the offices of game developer BioWare Austin, McNeil High School, and Austin White Lime Co., which signs identify as the campus plot's current landlord.
A number of tech businesses have offices in north Austin, such as Google, Qualcomm, Samsung, and National Instruments. Dell's global headquarters is less than 15 minutes away in the suburb of Round Rock.
Apple's planned space shows little to no development so far. It's covered mostly by brush, trees, and cacti, with dirt and gravel roads tracing through some sections. We did see signs that a gas line was being installed.
Perhaps more interestingly, we spotted a pair of people with an unmarked white SUV parked in front of the future main entrance, preparing to fly a drone. This wasn't a consumer model -- rather it was a DJI Inspire 2, which can shoot 6K video and has a top speed of 58 miles per hour.
The unidentified drone crew.
When it's full and complete the new campus may push Apple's Austin workforce as high as 15,000 people, which would make it the biggest private employer in Austin proper, despite companies like Amazon's Whole Foods being headquartered there. Some of the 5,000 new jobs will be in engineering and R&D, which could make Austin a source of next-generation products.
An official Apple site plan.
AppleInsider will be returning to the site regularly, to update you on the state of construction and progress of the build.
The planned build site is at the corner of Dallas Drive and West Parmer Lane, roughly a mile away from Apple's current Austin campus, also on Parmer. Parmer is a major thoroughfare in the city -- while traffic was relatively light when AppleInsider visited on Thursday morning, the road is often choked with traffic during rush hour in part because of Apple's existing campus, which employs thousands of people for operations work and AppleCare among other things.
The Dallas/Parmer intersection. The main entrance will actually be slightly further east on Parmer.
The immediate area is surrounded mostly by suburbs. Some points of interest though are the offices of game developer BioWare Austin, McNeil High School, and Austin White Lime Co., which signs identify as the campus plot's current landlord.
A number of tech businesses have offices in north Austin, such as Google, Qualcomm, Samsung, and National Instruments. Dell's global headquarters is less than 15 minutes away in the suburb of Round Rock.
Apple's planned space shows little to no development so far. It's covered mostly by brush, trees, and cacti, with dirt and gravel roads tracing through some sections. We did see signs that a gas line was being installed.
Perhaps more interestingly, we spotted a pair of people with an unmarked white SUV parked in front of the future main entrance, preparing to fly a drone. This wasn't a consumer model -- rather it was a DJI Inspire 2, which can shoot 6K video and has a top speed of 58 miles per hour.
The unidentified drone crew.
When it's full and complete the new campus may push Apple's Austin workforce as high as 15,000 people, which would make it the biggest private employer in Austin proper, despite companies like Amazon's Whole Foods being headquartered there. Some of the 5,000 new jobs will be in engineering and R&D, which could make Austin a source of next-generation products.
An official Apple site plan.
AppleInsider will be returning to the site regularly, to update you on the state of construction and progress of the build.
Comments
The other strange thing is that for all the employees, when we hear reports about specific development teams, those teams tend to be relatively small. Or, we hear about people being moved from one team to another, as if Apple doesn't have enough employees. None of this makes sense to me.
Yet people always wonder why apple moves so slowly. Relatively, they’re a considerably smaller company. And I seriously doubt this place will be packed the week after the doors open. I would imagine Apple is building for future growth up to a decade out.
Just in engineering roles, in addition to the obvious work of designing existing Apple products, which requires a good number of engineers, Apple also is engaged in
the design and development of specialized factory equipment and processes used to create those products,
the design and development of a growing number of chips and SIPs used in those products,
basic materials research to create specialized materials used in those products,
the support of a growing (already exceeding billion) user base engaged with those products,
QA and QC efforts associated with those products.
Then there’s the design of Apple’s facilities, stores, data centers, website,
engineers supporting Apple’s product partners, like IBM et al,
engineers supporting telecom partners, like AT&T, Verizon and 350 more around the world,
engineers supporting Apple’s salesforce,
health future product R&D initiatives,
transportation future product R&D initiatives,
AR future product R&D initiatives,
digital content future services R&D initiatives,
ongoing development and support of the App Store,
ongoing development of MacOS, iOS, TVOS, WatchOS, CarPlay, ApplePay, Apple Music, the suite of apps included with Apple hardware products,
cross-team development initiatives to share features and capabilities among Apple products, like continuity, iPhone/Watch integration, HomeKit, HealthKit, etc,
patent review, defense, and development initiatives,
participation with standards bodies to assist in the definition and advancement of engineering standards of interest to Apple; WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC, etc,
social and environmental initiatives,
marketing big-data development initiatives,
machine learning R&D,
software development tools (Swift, Metal, etc) R&D,
Apple’s Today At Apple course development,
engineers supporting Apple in education,
cloud services R&D,
and a fairly large number of IT staff to support local networks in each facility, support users and keep the internal Apple machine running smoothly.
Have I left anyone out?
The list truly does go on, doesn’t it? It’s not a matter of just current products versus future products, there’s a lot of richness and detail to creating and advancing a $220 billion+ revenue beast.
Perhaps the guys with the uberdrone can tell us more.
And B, take a look at Apple's job listings for Austin (you can set a filter). You'll see that some are customer service, or software engineering, but a lot of them are hardware engineering. I think most of the jobs in engineering outside of Cupertino are of a more mundane nature. It's the unglorified, nuts and bolts work that ultimately results in the functioning product envisioned and created by the upper tier engineers in California. In Apple world, all workers outside of the mothership are considered B Team one way or another.
It was originally built for Apple, but Apple decided not to move in, and Motorola leased it instead.
Look at 7700 Parmer in Google Maps:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/7700+West+Parmer+Lane,+Building+B/@30.4570575,-97.7526385,2614m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x8644cd0d3a04b17f:0x19c3f8615ca98856!8m2!3d30.4583883!4d-97.7507023