Jobs presented plans for the new office space, which will be in a circular four-storey building, to the Cupertino City Council recently.
The new 3.1 million square foot headquarters is designed to house 12,000 more Apple employees. According to Jobs, the company is “growing like a weed.”
“It’s clear we need to build a new campus”, Jobs said. “We’re just out of space.”
Apple is currently the largest technology company in the world by market value. Since introducing the wildly popular iPhone the company’s profits have skyrocketed.
Apple’s old headquarters at Infinite Loop Drive would be included in the new building, which would be on the almost 100-acre plot that Apple bought from computer giant Hewlett-Packard in 2010.
The price for the purchase of the land was never revealed, though it has been estimated at approximately USD 300 million.
“It’s a little like a spaceship landed,” Jobs said of the building.
“We’ve seen these office parks with lots of buildings, and they get pretty boring pretty fast, so we’d like to do something better than that.
“I think we do have a shot at building the best office building in the world. I really do think architecture students will come here to see this. I think it could be that good.”
It is rumoured that should the headquarters be built Apple will provide the town of Cupertino with free Wi-Fi.
The day before his presentation of the proposed new headquarters Jobs had been in San Francisco presenting Apple’s new iCloud service at a technology conference.
iCloud is Apple’s new service which incorporates the technology of cloud computing, which allows offices to dispense with buying expensive software.
Editor’s notes: Shortly after this article was published, in August 2011, Steve Jobs resigned as CEO following a series of medical complications and Tim Cook took over the role. Shortly after his resignation, in October 2011, Steve Jobs passed away due to pancreatic cancer.
The Apple Park Campus was completed in 2018 by Foster and Partners and full details of the $5 billion, 12,000-person capacity headquarters can be found here.
During the pandemic, Apple, like many other companies moved to a remote working policy. As lockdowns lifted, Cook decided to move towards a hybrid working policy and in late 2022, he advised staff to return to the office 3 days per week and to make sure that those in-office days corresponded with other team members’ in-office days so that in-person collaboration would occur.
In March 2023, it was reported by Fortune that Cook was cracking down on employees that were refusing to come back to the office.
At that time, Apple had not engaged in the mass layoffs that others in the tech industry had been engaging in since the Summer of 2022, however, in April 2023, it was reported that the company had started with a small number of corporate layoffs,
As of June 2023, Apple remained the largest company by market cap with a figure of $2.914 trillion.