Apple’s product development normally happens in absolute secrecy, but that’s kinda hard to pull off when you’re constructing something that looks like a giant UFO. As Apple’s Campus 2 site has undergone construction, we’ve continued to get frequent drone videos of the progress.
The latest drone-shot videos show real progress, with important things like walls and roofs actually starting to appear. Apple’s environmental credentials are also on show, with green landscaping work starting and solar panels going in.
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Both videos are shot with DJI drones, although with different levels of quality. Duncan Sinfield used a DJI Inspire 1 to capture images of the solar panels going in on the roof of the main building, which is a far cry from what the structure looked like a year ago. Landscaping is one of the areas that still needs a lot of work before any employees move in next year. At the moment, everything apart from the main buildings are just big piles of dirt (some of them particularly big).
The second video was filmed by Matthew Roberts using a Phantom 3 Pro. The smaller drone managed to get closer to the roof, and you can clearly see all the HVAC hardware Apple is having to install for all of its hard-working humans.
The scale of Apple’s new HQ is always difficult to grasp from the drone footage, but the occasional glimpse of tiny workers is enough to remind you how ambitious this project is. Construction will cost around $5 billion — expensive, for sure, but a lot less than Apple’s hundreds of billions of cash sitting offshore. (It’s less than Apple’s back tax bill to the European Union, for that matter.)
