Over the last few years, Apple has slowly been spending some of its giant wad of cash to build a gigantic new headquarters. The obviously-named spaceship will eventually house Apple’s staff, keep the R&D department in a hermetically sealed blogger-proof building, and give Apple its own auditorium to show off courage to the eager public.
Construction has been moving quickly over the last six months, and a pair of drone photographers have been keeping us up to date with progress thanks to montly flyovers. One of them, Matthew Roberts, has made a year-end wrap-up that shows all the changes that have happened over the last six months.
As it currently stands, most of the big construction is done. The main building has a structure, something that looks like a roof, and most of its walls. The iHill mountain of dirt has been graded, access roads and parking lots are nearly done, and aesthetic touches like glass walls are starting to go up.
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.)
